Poetry
Category: Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 72
ISBN: 9781854115478
Publication date: October 3, 2011
Price: £8.99
SHORTLISTED FOR THE FORWARD PRIZE (BEST FIRST COLLECTION) 2011
SHORTLISTED FOR THE FENTON ALDEBURGH FIRST COLLECTION PRIZE 2012
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“there is much to enjoy and admire in Loudness” – Warwick Review
“This is a terrific debut collection…” – Poetry London
“…contains moments of real sensitivity and vitality…” – New Welsh Review
Judy Brown’s beautiful first collection of poetry is called Loudness. A straightforward manner and a gift for ironic humour belie the artful complexities and the exacting observations evident in her work.
Titles like ‘The ExPats’, ‘The P45’, ‘The Crash’, kick start edgy narratives featuring characters who will suffer for their modern sins. Alternatively there are also disquisitions on colour, perception, ex-angels, spontaneous combustion and other mysterious phenomena. This baroque quality, along with her sudden modulations of tone and register, and a keenly sensuous appreciation of the physical world, is reminiscent of the metaphysical poets. She is an outstanding and original new voice in modern poetry.
“The poems are layered with intricate, precise observations, often from surprising and innovative perspectives… There is a seriousness of craft here, but the poetry is not without humour; a quiet irony or a dark thread of mischief often lurks just below the surface…” — Jan Fortune-Wood Envoi Issue 146
Listen to Judy Brown read her poem, ‘Best Drink of the Day’:
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.
