Books Books
Category: Ebooks, Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 70
ISBN: 9781781726662
Publication date: October 6, 2022
Price: £9.99
Category: Ebooks, Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 70
ISBN: 9781781726679
Publication date: October 6, 2022
Price: £7.99
Out of stock
“…each poem offers up its own shock of uneasy wonder… This is a thrilling and compulsive collection.” – Kathryn Simmonds
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 tension between order and disorder in these poems is informed by mathematics after Judy Brown’s residency at Exeter University’s Institute of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence. There she was inspired by specialists in uncertainty quantification, a branch of mathematics that seeks to estimate the uncertainty on model predictions.
The poems are introspective, by turns analytical, fearful and mocking in their response to the systems shaping an altered world. The 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.
Lairs follows on from Judy’s previous two collections, PBS-recommended Crowd Sensations (2016), which was shortlisted for the Ledbury Forte Prize and Loudness (2011) which was shortlisted for the Forward and Fenton Aldeburgh first collection prizes.
Judy Brown
Judy Brown was born in Cheshire. She grew up in Northumberland and Cumbria and studied English at Cambridge and Newcastle-upon-Tyne. She has worked as a lawyer in London and, in the early 1990s, in Hong Kong. Her pamphlet, Pillars of Salt (Templar Poetry, 2006), won the Templar Pamphlet Competition. She received the Poetry Society’s Hamish Canham Prize, and won the Poetry London Competition and the Manchester Poetry Prize. Judy’s first poetry collection, Loudness (Seren, 2011), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Fenton Aldeburgh Prize. Her second collection, Crowd Sensations (Seren, 2016) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was shortlisted for the Ledbury Forte Second Collection Prize. Her third collection Lairs was published by Seren in 2022.
Judy now works as a freelance tutor and mentor and gives Poetry Surgeries in London and online for the Poetry Society.
“Her opening lines are a gateway into complex, layered poems, each one its own world of wonder. Once the reader knows they can trust the poet, that she knows what she’s doing, we are willing to follow her anywhere … [the] sure-footedness in poetry allows Brown to venture into places a lesser poet might fear to tread.”
Caroline Bracken, Nation Cymru
“Brown has written a sumptuous book which is concerned with the breaking world. It is packed with surprises to nourish this jaded reader’s eyes and I urge you to dive in and luxuriate in it all. I shall be doing so again, often.”
Kate Noakes, London Grip
“Sometimes narky, sometimes tender and afraid, each poem offers up its own shock of uneasy wonder. Judy Brown troubles the edges of certainty in poems that greet us with a glittering strangeness. This is a thrilling and compulsive collection.”
Kathryn Simmonds
