Brandgevaar / Fire Hazard

Poetry Collection · Dutch (with English intermezzo)

A debut collection of around 200 poems exploring love, memory, and emotional loss. Moving between lyrical intimacy and darker self-reflection, Brandgevaar presents relationships as fragile, luminous, and ultimately vulnerable to time, grief, and disillusionment.

Expanded Synopsis

Brandgevaar is Filip Firlefijn’s poetic debut: a collection of approximately 200 poems in which love, language, and life itself are treated as fleeting and combustible realities. The title evokes both passion and danger—the beauty of feeling, and the risk of destruction that often accompanies it.

Across the collection, intimate poems of desire and tenderness gradually give way to a more personal and shadowed register. Certain texts sketch the background of a male figure whose voice carries traces of another era, suggesting memory, identity, and the burden of lived experience. In the later movement of the book, grief and emotional collapse become more central, deepening the earlier themes rather than contradicting them.

While the collection allows for layered interpretation, its emotional force remains direct and accessible. Brandgevaar / Fire Hazard is above all a poetic exploration of how love can illuminate, wound, and endure in memory.