IVotes to Poetry: 14

I've

m#t
wfu.

just turned

46

in my stupid
EiffeI tower

-Pam

p,?4

t*hirt

Brown

2-3 avril
Pam Browis 50-50 (Adelaide, Australia: Little Esther, 1997). The winning
cosmopolitan humor of these restlessly literate poems has its roots in an abiding experience of political and sensual liberation, the memory of which
immunizes the poet against all manner of backlash assaults on her and our
intelligence. As one of the jagged stanzas from 'Abstract Happiness"

/ & difficult / you supplicate I via failure -- /

it's only a tiny part / of the plan- / refusing to be shoved / into virtue / by
admirably puts

iil

"Recondite

ambitious hooligans / waving their dividends / like paper flags." Brown's

idiom is a bristling synthesis of the diaristic and apostrophic moments of the
New York School, the easy-seeming erudition of her occupation as a librarian,
a worldly eye estranged from the familiar by long familiarization with the
strange, and an irony honed on the paradoxes of Australia's geopolitical situation. A short list of the poems that bring these attributes together to powerful
effect would include "Vapours," "The Coast," "Seven Days," "Relics," "First
Things First" and "Prospects," but all the poems in this substantial volume
(nearly thirty poems and more than a hundred pages) hold their own. In fact,
that's part of the stubbornly utopian "plan" mentioned in 'Abstract
Happiness": the writer and reader go fifty-fifty here, sharing-tike the sweet-

ly delirious and androgynous adolescents do their

ssysl-1he

cigarette

on the book's

pleasures and the terrors of making something more than

meaning.

wwwarras.net

/ november 2001

gimmick