Stephen Brown’s first collection opens in one of Northern Ireland’s ‘spasmodic estates’ and sees education as a way out of the hellish circles of hi-jacked cars and lorries on fire. An ominous train journey and other more surreal poems keep Northern Ireland at the forefront of the collection’s main concerns.

Other poems look outwards and to other things such as early twentieth century sculpture. ‘1911’ imagines a Mona Lisa freed from her canvas and enjoying cucumber soup in a Left Bank café. 

The cover photo shows the historic walls of Derry and the book returns there at the end with the title poem, a reflection on a post-ceasefire state where ‘change creeps imperceptibly on the green stone’ and the guns that ‘keep the boys in thrall’ are merely Christmas presents for children, ‘just out of the bubble wrap.’

Reminders of the past are everywhere, though, and the ambiguities of ‘forgetting to survive’ sum up the importance and the impediment of memory. Remembering is both at the core of the effort to understand and also the cause of the insanity and the aporias that result from trying to come to terms with the trauma.

What the reviewers have said about Walking the Walls

Poems freshly squeezed straight from the landscape... The wonderful, terrible "Road Accident" is a beauty and a shock worthy of Muldoon, wandering into one's head uninvited days after reading the poem..... Full of dark pishoguery and fires-in-the-head, this is a thoroughly excellent short collection.

- Ailbhe Darcy (New Hope International Review)

"...read him if you want to encounter a lively spirit who can use his experiences to reveal something of the oddity and excitement of life."

- George Simmers (Sphinx Online Magazine)

"Lovely stuff." - Paul Muldoon