Pam Brown

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Biographical note:  Pam Brown's poetry has been published widely both in Australia and internationally. Since 1971 she has published many books and chapbooks of poetry and prose, including her most recent title Text thing in 2002. She has also written reviews, essays, filmscripts and theatre performance texts. Since 1997 she has been the poetry editor for the Australian literary quarterly overland. She lives in Sydney.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781876857547
ISBN-10:  1876857544
ISBN-13:  9781876857547
Author:  Pam Brown
Title:  Dear Deliria
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  15-Jan-03
Extent:  172pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  10 mm
Weight:  258 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 11.99
Price:  USD 17.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  Winner of the Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize 2004. Pam Brown’s poems are insomniacs in the sense that Rimbaud might have given the term: they are totally awake at all times. Zero slack, zero fuzz. Just total, delirious, desirous, and indelible attention to the real situations we find ourselves, implausibly but inextricably, thrown into.

Though it is the case that most people hold their own truths to be self-evident and their own deliria to be very dear indeed, it takes a poet of Brown’s caliber to break those narcissistic “holds” and release us into the lucid delights of a consciousness that long ago “lost all interest / in repetition” and set about building its singular sensations into fragilely-poised assemblages held together only but totally by the crazy glue of a bricoleur’s imagination.

Brown’s poetry addresses us with an uncanny intimacy that fast becomes addictive. There is no choosing between her poems, because each one has the air about it of an irreplaceable friend: just the one, in fact, whom you'd find yourself happiest to see at just the occasion the poem simultaneously makes and marks.

Her powers of observation recall James Schuyler at his most crystalline; her line matches William Carlos Williams at his highest and most surprising resolutions; and her stabbing vernacular wit and gift for the well-timed exclamation recalls Frank O’Hara in his giddier – high on translated Mayakovsky – moments.

That her poetry composes itself in such company, and brings Alice Notley, Nina Hagen, Eileen Myles, Patti Smith and others into the semiotic chorus to boot, gives to every page of her writing the kind of accompaniment that an intense café conversation between lovers – concentrated by their desire but not yet alone in it – might have.

A quick wit in love at the thick of things: it’s what we’ve needed from poetry all along, and it’s what we find in Pam Brown’s Dear Deliria.
Steve Evans, University of Maine

Table of contents:
I remember dexedrine. 1970
Straight all the length of me long
Honky tonk sunset
Pastoral solipsist
Tree farm – Monbulk
Leaving
Capricornia
Adelaide
Sheer veneer
A life transcendent
The long years
This is all
At the wall
Front
Flickering Gaudi
More coded than that
Twitching
In Ultimo
Abstract happiness
Pique
Relic
Park lunch
Blip
Vapours
little delirium the first
little delirium the second
little delirium the third
Zennish
Hypnotic
A sense of
Elegy in a research laboratory or ode to geophagy
Acting big
This & That (I cite myself)
Miracles
Fifty-Fifty
City
Bub
Eyes on potatoes
Not Myrna, Mina
The ing thing
Ceremonial, poignant
Mascarenes
Saint Expédit
On La Réunion
At the volcano
From Manoa
Mwà Véé
Montréal
Paris, France
In Brittany
Leaning
Seven Days
Memo
And next
Prospects
Aiming high
First things first
Glassine-wrapped
Funk descending
Patti Smith was right
Another think coming
Arcadia
Sunday
Lido
Scenes
Not the town
Chips
No Junk Mail Except For Pizza Things
20th century
Sentimental
Older than Cuba
Retarded pretensions
Drifting topoi
Balmy
9/169

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Excerpt from book:  

Elegy in a research laboratory or ode to geophagy

for Lesley Stern

Endowed with
a mysterious surplus
of pathos,
some find love
in
first-aid-certificate classes,
& volunteers, steeped
in thinghood,
line up
at the lime green turf
to replace divots
and collect
the contrasting tees,
     under a sign saying–
You are 13 kilometres
from a nuclear reactor.


But you & I,
to the mannerisms born,
relinquishing, momentarily,
the valency
of our works,
consult the
administrative-account
archives,
order extra bubble-tubes,
microscopy manuals,
many grams of graphite,
sweet sillimanite,
luscious limestone, faceted
dark-chocolate-coloured
rocks.
Addicted to dirt-eating,
the sufferer
(scum of the earth)
becomes the subject.
With ease, we scorn
Bondi Garden Kitten BBQ
& eat in.

Review quote:  Brown is an immensely interesting poet … because of an intellectual quality about her work that is a strange mix of lyricism and critique. … Perhaps it is no surprise that the sub-genre that is so often tiresome in the hands of many professional poets – the travel poem. of the things-I-saw-when-at-the-Oz-Council-flat-in-Paris poem – is, in Brown’s hands, the source of some of the best pieces in Dear Deliria.

David McCooey
Australian Book Review

Review quote:  The sound of Australian demotic, worked by a poetic lapidarist of mandarin-like reserve and refinement fuels these poems on interesting journeys to nowhere. Bon mots weave through the text like skateboarders through a plaza. Pam Brown’s poetry could convince you that ‘nowhere’ is the only place to be.

Kerry Leves
Australian Book Review

Review quote:  Pam Brown’s school of poetry, if one can call it that, might be described as ‘narrative imagism’, an amalgam of the modernists’ accentuation of the image and a postmodern talkiness that is itself the basis for a curriculum.

Susan M. Schultz
Heat

Review quote:  Pam Brown’s poems buzz with wit; she is the sharpest and yet the most gracious of us all. For her the dance of the intellect is more than a figure of speech. She is the Mina Loy for the twenty-first century.

Laurie Duggan

Review quote:  Brown wavers between “thing” and “think” emphasizing the material in language, even as she builds meditations with it – on work, postcoloniality, and Patti Smith … Born out of “this/ shambling/ contingency” it feels “Good to be back” – where contingency finds its momentary, certain beauty.

Susan M. Schultz