Pam Brown

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Biographical note:  Pam Brown’s poetry has been published widely both in Australia, where she lives, and internationally. Since 1971 she has published many books and chapbooks of poetry and prose. Her recent title Dear Deliria published by Salt in 2002 was awarded the New South Wales Premier’s Prize for poetry in 2004. She has also written reviews, essays, filmscripts and theatre performance texts. For five years she was the poetry editor for the Australian literary quarterly Overland and is currently the Associate Editor for Jacket magazine.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844715152
ISBN:  9781844715152
Author:  Pam Brown
Title:  True Thoughts
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BB
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  02-Oct-08
Extent:  84pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  11 mm
Weight:  126 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 8.99
Price:  USD 15.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  True Thoughts follows the success of Pam Brown’s last major collection Dear Deliria published in late 2002 and awarded the NSW Premier’s Prize for Poetry in 2004.

This new work collects twenty-three poems written between 2002 and 2007 in a period of global instability and military irruption. Even so, this collection of deceptively minimalist poems is anchored in the everyday and moderated by a self-conscious slant to it. The poems move with a clear agency through many realms, both actual and metaphysical. The actual includes sharply delineated streetscapes, imagined havens, distant places, encounters with friends, ideas, history, and a kind of fragmented urbanity. The metaphysical engages multilayered states of being and, sometimes, simple moods.

Brown’s writing is deftly ironic, and affects a sense of the ludicrous in the face of mortality, as the poems attempt to fathom the question ‘how to live?’ alongside the larger one ‘how to live now?’

Table of contents:
Existence
Amnesiac recoveries
Death by droning
Ultradian rhythm
Euro heatwave
No action
Early October
In europe
Third autumn
Augury
Anyworld
Today there is much more heritage than there used to be
Saxe blue sky
Darkenings
One Day in Auckland
Peel me a zibibbo
Fall to float
Flecks
Low to go
Lab face
Ming blue
Wordly goods
Train train

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Excerpt from book:  

Death by droning

Death by droning
the skywriter
       does the third letter,
we already recognize
     the brand name
(I couldn’t write a memoir
           to save myself,
that would have been
            the beginning—
a fine day a bright sky a skywriter
       circa 2003
      (‘circa’—a word
               I detest)     but
droning on is not
                         my way,
mine’s more a kind of
                   devolution
or          maybe,
     simply,    to make art
 through spaces,
      without notes to myself —
            none — myself to myself),
 chasing the unknowable,
‘drink your noumenal—
     you’ll feel
                 much better!’
and so, to conclude
   ’frenzal rhomb!
       what kind of a name is that then?’,
                       just doesn’t work

Previous review quote:  Pam Brown’s work reads like a particle map, a range of trajectories arcing off into open space, determining that space through movement, velocity and the inertia created, at times shocking associated bodies (poetic, politic, cultural, critical) into action and reaction. Her voice has maintained a consistent edge and vitality, and perhaps peculiarly enough for one often at odds with the lyric, or at least the lyrical, it has remained her voice. There is a distinctive intimacy to Brown’s work; a familiar persona at play, not just tinkering with the engine of language but opening the throttle and revving it with glee, skill and a wry look at the road – language, poetry – ahead and behind.

Brown’s gift for pastiche accompanies the possibility that the self is never anything much more than a daily work of bricolage. For that knowledge, Brown’s poetry never fails to give – and give generously with great humour and acuity – a critically appraised delight in the world. There is a ferocity to her wit guided by a gracious, ironic and optimistic self, at ease with the oddness of the world’

Michael Brennan
Poetry International Web

Previous review quote:  There are many ways to peel an onion: sharp knife and tears; under water like your mother taught you; surreptitiously, creeping in, layer by layer; or with sunglasses on. And cunning poet Pam Brown knows them all. There they are, those devastatingly onion-like little poems, with furled skins and layers, offering up biting street-scapes and cafés, half-remembered far-away places, distant friends, rock & roll, and lost, ordinary cities; that deceptive, seemingly autobiographical voice cruising between wit, boredom, disillusion, nostalgia, paranoia, irony. Always irony. Always the slippery poetics of knowledges warping, even as the poet obsessively scans the texts for narrative.

Lyn McCredden
Australian Literary Studies

Previous review quote:  Brown’s poems are like single channels that can transmit more than one signal simultaneously. The poems are streams of data and highly arranged works.

David McCooey
Australian Book Review