Exurbia

Exurbia is the name of the urban fringe at the outer limits of suburbia. These poems begin here, characterised by edges, transition and change. In the assured lyric voice for which Andy Brown's poetry has become well known, they pay meticulous attention to where and how we make our homes. The poems of the book's central sequence are elegiac versions inspired by the Argentinian poet Borges, gazing over the city's blurred outskirts at dawn and sundown, while the book's final poems reach fully ex urbia, arriving at woodlands and moors, rivers and estuaries. Here, from the edge of the shoreline, they head out to sea before making a circular migration back home.