While still a student, Brew participated in college literary activities and experimented with prose, poetry, and drama.
After graduation he won a British Council poetry competition in Accra, and his poems appeared in the Ghanaian literary journal Okyeame, as well as several important African anthologies.
Shadows of Laughter (1968), a collection of his best early poems, reveals a thematic interest unusual for a Ghanaian poet: the value of the individual compared with that of society as a whole.
African Panorama and Other Poems (1981) draws upon the sights and sounds of rural and urban Ghana.
[4] His first published collection, The Shadows of Laughter (1968), was divided into five thematic sections: "Passing Souls" (on death); "Today, We Look at Each Other"; "The Moment of Our Life" (nature); "A Plea for Mercy" (the supernatural); and "Questions of Our Time".