Between the Brown Banks

Between the Brown Banks: A London Lyric is a poetic sequence shaped by walking, witnessing, and return.

Moving along the course of the Thames, Jean G-Owen writes as flâneuse and mudlark, gathering fragments of a city in flux. Here, London is both intimate and estranged: a place of reinvention, rupture and reflection. The river—Old Father Thames—threads through the work as witness and bearer, holding grief alongside the sediment of history.

From the spectral undercurrent of St Paul’s to the charged spaces of Westminster, South Bank and Greenwich, these poems explore what a city keeps and what it lets go. Interwoven with this central sequence are companion pieces that deepen the emotional register—meditations on memory, mortality and the unresolved question of what it means to endure.

This Figmentum chapbook offers a passage through London that is at once personal and political, grounded and mythic—written in the knowledge that love, like the city itself, is always subject to change.