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23rd September, 2022

Friday Poem – ‘Fish. Oh. Fish’ by Judy Brown


This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Fish. Oh. Fish’ by Judy Brown from her forthcoming collection Lairs.

This cover shows a collage of a woman sitting in a field at twilight starting at a giant black orb, in the distance, filled with stars. Red mountains stretch out behind it. The text reads Lairs Judy Brown.

Lairs brings together something primal and secret – the lair as haven for a wild or feral animal – with the poem framed as a mathematical equation. In these terms, the ‘lair’ is a kind of nest, a beautiful accumulation of dense detail. The poems are introspective, by turns mocking, fearful and analytical. Judy Brown’s use of language is innovative, while maintaining moments of vulnerability and moving self-awareness. In these exquisite poems, the lair is both the community at large and a dark and intricate interior space where something wild still survives.

Fish. Oh. Fish ‘Even snakes lie together’ – D.H. Lawrence (‘Fish’) Your egg eye is open and you look worried. You’re the scaly junior lawyer at midnight f alling short on her target of a year’s billable hours. Corporate fish, you’re bright as pain, sliced up. You share the water with a spill of inky stripes. Y our kind blaze colours fine as banknotes. Oh, fish, you have whisked up a clever curve defining the future as it draws itself into a fist. Then the e vening comes on, pistachio and blue. You breathe and flex between bars of dark. A clerk could still walk into the hot, open night lea ving a jacket on the back of her office chair. A lit anglepoise floats above the papery desk. There’s a deep anglerfish clocking the hours. No one m ust turn off your light while you are gone or there’ll be nothing to swim back to but a scrunchie of kelp, uncounted on dry sand. Little fish, everything that matters happens here.

Lairs is available to pre-order on the Seren website: £9.99

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