Review by Peter Raynard of "Our Fathers" by Michael Brown

 

In a world where on the one hand powerful men are abusing their position through predatory activity towards women, whilst on the other there are surging rates of suicide in men under the age of forty-five, it is important that we write to fill the picture with positive portrayals of men, by subverting the notion of what a "real man" is. Poetry has responded to this more recently, with books by Jack Underwood and Ray Antrobus gaining recognition.

Michael Brown’s Overton Poetry Prize-winning pamphlet Our Fathers is a welcome addition to this trend. Being both a parent (of a daughter) and a son himself, Brown’s poems convey tri-generational relations, relations with other men, and boyhood escapades.

The opening poem "In the Men’s Group" sets a sad scene of "a man whose wife told him he is a waste of space," and "a policeman sleeping on a blow up bed at his parents."

We then move to a short powerful poem "Shift" which is reminiscent of poems by Fred Voss: "The man made of shopfloor swarf put down / The battered gold and green baccy tin // The machinery in his head diminishing // At the sink his wife can sense the shift in him."

His relationship with his father is set in the family car, a place where measures of a relationship unfold. In the poem "In Late Summer, 1983" they are on the M1 taking Brown to live in another town. Looking at his father to "stare across the front passenger seat / at Watford Gap, or some other nondescript place he’d check on the map / to look at the way we’d come, how far."

There is a confidence in the variety of form and sound of each poem, such as in "Aqua Terra," with off rhymes across lines, such as skill, kill, flint, and microlith.

Finally I like the way Brown ends the pamphlet with the poem "Cot Song" about the birth of his daughter (who is now a teenager at least), subverting a linear narrative, showing the fragility of a newborn life, the responsibility of a parent, and the signalling of constant renewal:

          Little limb reaching up

         for some response
         from us, such Gods

         who kept you
         in the cosmos of your cot.

When asked what a poet should do in their writing, Louis MacNeice said "mention things." Brown mentions plenty of things in a short space of sixteen poems. He is rewriting what a man is, and what men can be, in a world where other so-called men catch the headlines for all the wrong reasons.

About the reviewer

Peter Raynard is an independent researcher, poet and editor of Proletarian Poetry. His three books of poetry are: Precarious (Smokestack, 2018), The Combination: a poetic coupling of the Communist Manifesto (Culture Matters,2018), Manland (Nine Arches Press, 2022). A debut pamphlet (a heroic crown of sonnets), The Harlot and the Rake: poems after William Hogarth, was published by Culture Matters in September 2024.