Dawn Watson

We Play Here

Granta Books (August 2023)

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.

‘Exquisitely imagined.’

— The Belfast Telegraph

‘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, Cain; The Book of Jonah

‘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; Profit and Loss

‘With tenderness and defiance, Watson has created a fearless poem about open wounds and broken childhoods.’

— The Guardian

‘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, 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

‘We Play Here is a powerful collection. Watson’s specificity and attention to cadence and language mean that the poem never seems long; it unfurls like a winding path, moving across the unreliable landscape of childhood […] presents the reader with the miraculous and terrible all rolled into one. This is a moving and accomplished snapshot of four lives, neither pitying or sentimental, but beautifully wrought.’

— Alice Tarbuck, Magma Poetry

‘Compassing habits of both poetry and prose and ‘doing the double’, the Energy/ Mass of Watson’s poetic lines, life-lines, incurve to shore each other. In their specific light, they ‘tell the birds’ – all those ‘wondering why help doesn’t come/ to small things’: ‘It’s not your fault, it’s theirs.”

— Natasha Cuddington, Cyphers

‘The high wire act that defines this book is Dawn Watson’s ability to simultaneously render a childlike vision of a particular moment and the haze with which one looks back on the past… It’s a book written in trichromatic technicolour where the everyday is given a psychedelic edge (concrete places like Mount Vernon and Skegoneill Avenue become dreamscapes of flowing water) and the militarised elements of the world around the children simply fall into place.’ 

— Stephen Connolly

‘Impressive… It’s a testament to Watson’s subtlety and skill as a poet that the girls’ voices never lose their barbed humour, or their humanity… Formally assured and immensely readable, We Play Here takes its cues from Ciarán Carson’s acutely observed poems of Belfast city, and the magic realism of novelists such as Jan Carson, to create a new poetics of its own.’ 

— Jessica Traynor, The Irish Times

‘Watson writes working-class, Protestant girlhoods, deeming them worthy of poetic attention in an Irish poetic landscape that tends to exclude these perspectives.’ 

— Ellen Orchard, Poetry Ireland Review

‘Dawn Watson’s We Play Here is an extraordinary long poem. Watson has a remarkable ability to recover both the sensations of childhood and the febrile atmosphere of the Troubles, where terror was normalised and violence endemic.’

— Judges, PEN HEANEY Award