We Play Here by Dawn Watson
We Play Here is a collection of four poem-stories, taking place in an underdeveloped area of Protestant North Belfast in the summer of 1988, against a background of political turbulence during the Troubles. Written from the perspectives of four female friends in the months between finishing primary school and starting high school, the girls inhabit an eerie, elemental landscape of normalised violence, poverty and neglect. This is a lyrical and graceful evocation of working-class girlhood that rings of Elena Ferrante’s studies of female friendships in the Neapolitan novels, Didier Eribon’s Returning to Reims, and Annie Ernaux’s The Years.
It is a radical approach to girlhood and girl-friendships, the kind of skewered space before an imposition of gender, or before the trappings of gender make themselves strongly known. Innocence is tinged here with a kind of hidden menace.
We Play Here is a collection of four poem-stories, taking place in an underdeveloped area of Protestant North Belfast in the summer of 1988, against a background of political turbulence during the Troubles. Written from the perspectives of four female friends in the months between finishing primary school and starting high school, the girls inhabit an eerie, elemental landscape of normalised violence, poverty and neglect. This is a lyrical and graceful evocation of working-class girlhood that rings of Elena Ferrante’s studies of female friendships in the Neapolitan novels, Didier Eribon’s Returning to Reims, and Annie Ernaux’s The Years.
It is a radical approach to girlhood and girl-friendships, the kind of skewered space before an imposition of gender, or before the trappings of gender make themselves strongly known. Innocence is tinged here with a kind of hidden menace.
We Play Here is a collection of four poem-stories, taking place in an underdeveloped area of Protestant North Belfast in the summer of 1988, against a background of political turbulence during the Troubles. Written from the perspectives of four female friends in the months between finishing primary school and starting high school, the girls inhabit an eerie, elemental landscape of normalised violence, poverty and neglect. This is a lyrical and graceful evocation of working-class girlhood that rings of Elena Ferrante’s studies of female friendships in the Neapolitan novels, Didier Eribon’s Returning to Reims, and Annie Ernaux’s The Years.
It is a radical approach to girlhood and girl-friendships, the kind of skewered space before an imposition of gender, or before the trappings of gender make themselves strongly known. Innocence is tinged here with a kind of hidden menace.
About the Author
Dawn is a writer from Belfast, Northern Ireland. She completed a PhD in poetry in 2022 and is currently a lecturer in creative writing at Queen’s University.
Her poetry pamphlet The Stack of Owls is Getting Higher (2019) is published with The Emma Press. She is the recipient of an ACES award from the Arts Council NI. Her work has been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and has appeared in journals including The Poetry Review and Granta.
Dawn has an MA in Poetry: Creativity and Criticism from Queen’s University. She also holds a BA in English with Creative Writing, winning the Ruth West Poetry Scholarship Award, the Dr Henry Hutchinson Stewart Literary Scholarship for academic achievement, and the Dr George Alexander Baird Scholarship. She is a former national tabloid sub editor.
Praise for We Play Here
‘An extraordinary, enviably great debut. Watson has that rare ability to capture the ever-present strangeness of childhood and to use that to let us into a specific history with intellectual and imaginative generosity … a game-changing narrative long poem you’ll want to keep close.’
— Luke Kennard (Notes on the Sonnets, Cain)
‘In We Play Here, Dawn Watson gives us a closely-mapped, child’s-eye-view of a North Belfast community in the mid-1980s, where poverty and mental illness are routine, and where everyday violence refracts along gender lines in a way little enough heard about. Watson’s sequences, in the voices of four 12-year-old girls, record this broken world innocently, movingly and humorously – but, more than this, through their attention to beauty and wonder, they map these girls’ inner lives, where imagination and poetry itself survive.’
— Leontia Flynn (The Radio, Drives, These Days)
‘A unique new voice in poetry who reminds us that what some people call history, others might call memory; and what some might deem a city, others might insist is actually the individual topography of their childhood’
— Andrew McMillan, (Physical, Pandemonium)
‘I reached the end of We Play Here, and was so sorry it had ended I immediately read it again (twice more). From its capturing of the child-like vocabulary and intonation, to its subtly allusive and complicated child-via-adult birds-eye view, it makes an utterly compelling narrative. Its world is immediately recognisable in more than its Belfast context, and where the Troubles shadow the narrative, so too – more evidently – does the poverty-fuelled violence that characterised the decade.’
— Fran Brearton (Reading Michael Longley)
Publisher: Granta
Date Published: August 2023
Paperback, 112 pgs.
ISBN: 9781915051066
