Fall of the Rebel Angels

Synopsis

Fall of the Rebel Angels: Poems 1996-2006 brings together the best of Andy Brown’s poems from the first ten years of his publications. Through his light-touch exploration of our sense of selves, public and private, Brown’s work explores ideas of ‘relationship’ in its widest senses –

the ecology of the natural world and our relationship to it

the intimacy and intricacies of personal relationships

the relationships between language and experience, memory, imagination and reality

Informed by philosophies of Critical Realism, Brown’s poetry explores pertinent environmental and philosophic ideas, combining ontological inquiry with accessible lyric language and form, subtle humour, and a direct engagement with the ‘thing-ness’ of the world.

Praise for Previous Work

‘Andy Brown is one of our most interesting and exciting younger poets. With its love of ideas and language, his work demonstrates that there need be no barriers in poetry; that the philosophical, the lyrical and the playful can be combined in work of assured and generous vision.’ —John Burnside

‘Andy Brown’s poems pull the reader into a series of exchanges, questionings, back and forth, writer to reader, reader to writer. Vivid and tangible, there is a real wit that at times makes me laugh out loud, a true learning, and a gentle humanity to these tender-hearted poems that is genuinely moving.’ —Lee Harwood

‘These are poems which are, in every way, suffused with light.’ —Deryn Rees-Jones

‘Smilingly human ... for Brown the world is not what we construct with the aid of our experiential and ideological building blocks, but is in front of us all the time if we would only see it. A gentle humour pervades, almost Eastern, imbuing the work with humanity and warmth.’ —Shearsman

‘Brown moves from the lyrical to the analytical with an apparent seamlessness. The work here is full of quietly startling moments.’ —Poetry Quarterly Review