Janet Newman

Pam Brown

Pam Brown. Missing Up. ISBN 978-1-922181-50-3.

Sydney: Vagabond Press, 2015. RRP $AUS 25. 160 pp.

Missing Up is the latest collection by Australian poet Pam

Brown, who has published more than thirty books and
chapbooks of poetry and prose since 1971. Brown lives in
Sydney and is a former editor of Overland and associate editor
of Jacket magazine. In 2013 she held the Distinguished Visitor
Award at Auckland University. Missing Up is a collection of lyric
poems illustrated with austere photographs of unpeopled
urban sterility, linked by the theme of urban alienation and
scepticism over contemporary materialism.
This small but weighty book contains thirty-one short-line
poems. White space between lines and words slows the reader,
providing pause and a feeling of staccato as verbs detach from
nouns, metaphors split in two. Ampersands alone on lines
provide gaps between ideas. Enjambment accentuates or
changes meaning. These techniques produce disconnection, a
heightened awareness of the everyday bricolage that interrupts
inner consciousness. Its a theme articulated in the first poem,
Required Reading, which ends:

the poems say

more
than I want them to,
no clarity really, cant decide
which way to read them

everything left
as it is,
the fridge compressor
 gurgles

The functional background sound of the refrigerator behind a

poetic voice that cannot find in language the means to express
itself is a fine image of the collections bid to reveal the
struggle for coherence amid the noise and confusion of
Western, twenty-first century modernity.
The grim photographs, such as the cover shot showing a
single string of coloured light bulbs intersecting a sky
crisscrossed with power lines, suggest failed attempts to
counter urban sterility. The poems similarly describe an urban
world of spiritual and moral emptiness. Even this countrys
cultural heritage is drawn as synthetic and saleable. The
Taps, which is dedicated to Michele Leggott and Susan Davis,
describes a visit to the Polynesian market:

te koti
19th century maori leader,
appliqued, stylised in red & black,
on a polyester flag
hanging from a honey-coloured wall
that smells like vetiver grass

In & Surrounds, the blank and imposing city architecture

intrudes upon, and complements, a nihilistic stream of
consciousness. The title Flat white may be mocking not only
the coffee culture but also a racial demographic. This poem
describes an anti-establishment vision of modernity, where the
bourgeoisie are:

the ones
with unhappy consciousness
who are seeking
a brains & sex harmony motor
to spruce up
the non-lived
 flat white life
in
natural surroundings

There is venom in Browns sardonic take on the bland culture

of mass consumerism.
A derisive tone lends to the collection an air of resignation, a
heightened sense of hopelessness. But there is much to enjoy
in its carefully crafted stanzas disguised as random streams of
consciousness, and Browns innovative word choice, especially
the use of language from science, technology and
pharmacology. The poetry is full of anxiety, of questing for
meaning. At times powerful, its raft of subject matter
energises. It bravely brings to light the difficulties of
distinguishing the real from the manufactured, truth from lies,
in a world increasingly influenced by media, advertising and
the reductive language of digital technology. Its form replicates
the way even sensory information is received in a series of
disconnected bullet points or sound bites.
Never polemic, the collections subversive vision is delivered
with lyrical invention.