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JOHN TRANTERSurprises

Pam Brown, Horne by DarkBristol, UK: Shearsman 20L3,132 PP Pb

ISBN 978L848612884, RRP $23.00

Like many in her large and heterogeneous generation of Australianpoets, Pam Brown was born in the late 1940s and began writing poe*yin the ear\y 1970s. Unlike some) she has gone on writing, carefullystepping around the traps of fame and renown, and becoming lessdiscordant and more complex and thoughtful as she has developed.She has also cravelled widely in Europe and North America. This is herseventeenth book, though that ignores her ten chapbooks and otherproductions.

She says that she has earned a living as a librarian, nufse, Pub-lisher's assistant, postal worker, arnvorker and teacher of writing,multi-media studies and film-makirrg . In a recent interview she saysthat by Lg75l76I worked as a mail sorter and was Playrng music in thewomen's band, Clitori.s Band,and by L977I was involved in the anarcho-feminist theatre group: the Lean Sisters. Such is her dislike ofanything orthodox that all her published books have been publishedby independent publishers; and with this one, as with some in the Pffit,she has gone off-shore

She has also been closely involved in developing a wider audiencefor Australian poetry, especially during the last decade, when she waspoerry editor for Ouerland magazine, then associate editor for Jacket

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All this travel and publishing activity would make up a rich back-ground for an academic career in Aust. Lir., though Pam has abjuredthe academic 1ife. Indeed, few academic scholars have done as muchquality work, and sometimes it seems as rhough rhe best and mosrproduccive lifelong scholars of literature, like Pam in Sydney and KrisHemensley inMelbourne, have chosen to have no connection with anyuniversity.

The tide of this volume is Horne Bjt Dark.Ir's nor "Home BeforeDark", which is what one imagines a Norman Rockwell-type parenrsaying to a child: "Yes, you can go to Tommy's birrhday paftft bur youmust be home before dark " Home Bj Dark suggesrs a close tie, wirhtwo presences arriving at the door almosr at the same time: the poer,and, lowering over her shoulder, the shadow of the vast and over-populated land of death. Pam Brown is now sixry-six, born rhe sameyear as fellow-poets Alan Wearne and the late Michael Dransfield. Theofficial retiring age inAustraliq though it's not really official, is sixty-five. As she writes "I'11 do / something diffirent / ro celebrate f gerringas old as this".

At least she has a home to go to, and perhaps rhar's the point ofthe title. Nearly thkty years ago - a gerleration ago - US poer AndreiCodrescu edited che anthoLogy Up la,te,whose tide contradicts rhe ritleof this book. The Poets.org site says "Picking up where the ground-breaking and anti-academic Grove Press anthology of New AmericanPoetry left off in L960, American Poetry Since L970: {Jp la,te is a gatheringof wildly provocative and experimental work from over one hundredAmerican poets."

As poet David Kirby explains, "This is a big, $azy,rasry book ... themiddle-class poet-professor who edits his school's literary magazine isdeliberately excluded; instead... [this] anrhology emphasizes work thatis erotic, feminist, Zen, surreal, and urbanf gritty." Beatnik poeffy,perhaps. During her early.years, thaCs rhe kind of poerry Pam Brownstood for.

Z6L

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plants / imported from Korea , it's a carbon toe-print / in there ,reciting a poem... I to half a dozen/ variously demented elders f atthe day care centre. A lesser poet would work up a full poem fromeach of these apereus, but Pam Brown has learned the virtues of a lightand generous touch, and scaffers them like petals.

Occasionally an image can seem like a snapshot of the floatingworld taken as an aide-memoire, and recalls the poetry of her friendLaurie Duggan, for example hot and stonkered f cattle lyttg on theroad f to carnavon gorge . Duggan's work is often an amalgam of oddthings he's seen blended with the quasi-historical and quasi-quotidianassemblage methods of (the deceased) US poets Paul Metcalfe andPhilip \Vhalen. Duggan appears glancingly in one of these poemswhere the author is caught in the viewfinder writing one of the poemsthat you, the r eader, are reading: micts on the keyboard / pushingthoughts and jingles f out ll ro Dublin to Seattle,l Adelaide, Kane'ohe,/ Faversham, Glebe. (So are these poems mere thoughts and jingles ?They're certainly not great works of landscape art: I successfullydisregarded / the landscape , she writes.)And where are these thoughts and jingles being sent? From her listabove, Dublin is twelve miles north of Bray, the town where her Irishpublisher friend and fellow-poet Randolph Healey lives, Sea*le iswhere her friend and collaborator the Egrptian poet Maged Zaher lives,Adelaide is where her friend and fellow-poet Ken Bolton lives, Kane'oheis the suburb of Honolulu where her friend and fellow-poet SusanSchultz lives, Faversham is the town in Kent, England, where her friendand fellow-poet Laurie Duggan lives, and the Sydney suburb of Glebe,handy to the University of Sydney, is where Pam and many of herfriends and fellow-poets, including most of those named. here andelsewhere in this book, lived way back when.

Though few readers could guess any of that. So is the purpose ofthis writing obsessively private? No, it can't be: here it is, in a mass-produced paperback book, distributed around the world for all to see.

Yet not all of her work is available as books . On the page that lists

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And such is her reticence that one of the Chapbooks is rirle d LixteDroppings, as though her smaller works were nor only lirtle, bur asuseless as droppings, though of course even bodily waste has its use asfertilizer Ics a rabbit life , as she comments in the poem Rehab forEveryone .

Of course this redcence is the obverse of the coin of serious poetry''as set on a pedestal by Matrhew Arnold and F.R. Leavis. Rather thanclaim the laurel wreath of serious poetry in the manner of petrarch,Pam Brown shrugs off her verse as so much waste paper, to borrow theterms of the Manchester Guard,ian's early assault on T.s. Eliot's poemThe waste Land . This laconic perspective aligns her wirhJohn Forbesand Ken Bolton and with many other Austalians. If she dismisses herown poetry,the rheory goes, rhen she can't be cut down as a tall poppy.Yet.she wrires a minor chroniclet I of moments /l hey, stop ,anticipacing and rejecting such criricismThere's quire a bir of French in this book, and I would hazard rheguess that it has become more frequent with each of the auchor'sbooks. Again, the reader is nor told this explicicly, bur pam has lived inFrance on and off for decades, and her parrner is a teacher of Frenchand the author of a rexrbook widely used in teaching rhe language.You could say the French is natural, and not an affectacion.

Does she quote Proust? well, no, though she menrions him rwice,saying thanks Marcel both times. And in the poem More than afeuillecon she admirs that one can't. call the sentimental / 'send-mental' f whenids very moving , and goes on to say that the wayyoucanf 'loseyour self 'f toatear, f toaremble evenf whenever thatsong/ begins, f whentbat scent f wafrs - / a prelude I to loss, ro geming losr,,.Of course the word lost is a translation of ..perdu,, (rs in A larecherche du temps perdu, the tirle of Prousds grear novel), which hingeson a remembered taste and is so full of remembered songs and scentsthat it is a hymn to recovered memory.

The poems in rhis book arc very varied, rhough rhey all seem rodeal with the day-to-day life of the poer, ar leasr as ic is reflected in rhe

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in the dry tone ofvoice and in the careful selecrion of the relling demilis the wry reflecting mind of the poer. Pam Brown has lived rhoroughlyand read widely - voraciously one might say - and she is presenr inevery angle and perspecrive she brings ro her daily life.

These poems are richly rewarding and I have grown to like her workmore than chat of almosr any orher poer. \[/hile many writers havesettled into a comfortable accommodarion wirh their prejudices pamBrown seems to have shed all her illusions and has kept on growingand developing. Rather rhan rhe big gesrure she has learned co focuson and norice rhe lirde rhings the telling detail and the casual gesturethat macters. Each image is broughr ro us thoughdulty from rheeveryday world and each poem is a surprise.