This week our Friday Poem is taken from the brand new, beautiful Crowd Sensations by Judy Brown. A Poetry Book Society Recommendation, Crowd Sensations is the worthy follow-up to Judy’s Forward Prize-nominated debut, Loudness.
Judy Brown is a poet of vivid contrasts, of thoughtful paradox, intimate confidences and precise evocations. Her titles and first lines draw readers into a poem then often surprise with an unexpected narrative. A key theme in this new collection is the contrast between living in the city and the countryside; her take on landscape is original and characteristically unnerving: ‘Elterwater Rain’, ‘Dove Cottage Ferns’ and ‘One of the Summer People’ reflect on nature and the place of the traveller, the incomer, the tourist.
Elterwater Rain
When I came to write of it there was no rain,
just the last of its ectoplasm shivering
in a pool on the terrace’s lowest slate.
No sky winks in the left-behind liquid,
only the garden table’s black metal underside –
all is prediction, absence, an oracle’s glum vigil –
whilst the air, hyperactive, holds more weather:
weather folded in weather, the rest of the day
remains to be dealt like a deck of wet cards.
Town rain splits and skids but this land accepts
what is given. Foliage moves against foliage;
water drains down the conifers’ inner ladders.
Something thirsts for each substance spilled
but this liquid is neighbourly, a local’s drink.
Outside Ambleside’s tourist shops, dog-bowls
brim with downpour. Here the last shower
hangs about too, old drops slung like bats
from the bird-feeder and the patio chairs.
These are poems that confront the reader, steeped in realism, they are not designed to soothe or beguile. They are not designed with careful overlays of irony and although frequently clever, they are not pretentious but vigorously alive and often quite funny.
This week, our Friday Poem is taken from 
