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Andy Brown
For the past 15 years Andy Brown has lived in Devon, close to the sea, a subject that has formed a central motif in his poetry.
He is Director of the Centre for Creative Writing & Arts at the University of Exeter. The author and editor of ten books, his latest collections are an early selected poems, Fall of the Rebel Angels: poems 1996-2006 (Salt Publications), and Goose Music, a collection of poems written in collaboration with John Burnside (also Salt).
publications:
the storm berm
Andy Brown’s linguistic originality and his delight in experiments with form, show his love of language and willingness to play with music, meaning and the reader's expectations and perceptions.
Poetry Review
The Storm Berm from the storm berm
Our dinghy wallows and the water swears
to pitch us into the elating world
of dogfish and bass, where the earth falls off;
where thunder rolls in with a probing light.
Behind us, doe-eyed harbour seals disturb
the surface, their knowing bodies rolling
underneath, stirring strong eddies and whorls.
Ahead the water bends into the creek
between the buoys that mark the shallow strait.
Our boat restores its pitch and makes the quay
busy now with labouring fishermen
piling sandbags high onto the berm.
We moor and join them, shoring our defence
against the rising tide; the coming storm.