8/10/2019 'This World. This Place.' by Pam Brown (UQP 1994) reviewed by Kevin Brophy

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A long^)waY, not

Kevin Brophy

Pomelo Brown This World/thisPloce UQP, Sl6.95pb

Someu)hertwithin this idea of thingsthere lurks the soul of a brick veneer,and being a poet in these late capitalisttimes is lilcc using anhour glass ratherthan a digital watch ... Look at all thesethings in this oaerstuffed city . And outon the perimeters" NeighbourhoodWatch saaes another VCR

This dumb belief in immortality.

On this side, aneryone liaes as if thereis time to become someone else. Eaery-one desires asmall couaade. And then,at fun*als,they all simply act as ifsomeone furgot to turn up.

OUVADE? I go to the ConciseOxford, where I find aquaintlyphrased definition for this curi-

ous word: 'Primitive people's customby which husband feigns illness and isput

tobed when his wife lies in.' Puttingaside the assumptions hanging off theword'primitive' here, I pursue'lies in'because (this dumb belief in meaning)I want the dictionary to say what it

ABR o 44

means. With 'lies in' that prim pair,Fowler and Fowler, Oxford's editors,come closer to the point by mentioningchildbirth andlying-in hospitals. Ah yes,lying-in hospitals.

lnCreating aNation (reviewed inthis issue) Patricia Grimshaw writesabout Melbourne's Lying-In Hospital(later

the Royal women's Hospital)whictr was established in the 1850s toserve the needs of young married moth-ers-to-be. Unmarried mothers wereturned away. Sometimes the unmar-ried others borrowed marriage certifi-cates from friends so that they couldlie-in. Sometimes the committee run-ning the hospital sought permission toconduct searches of marriage registra-tions in cases of doubt. We have comea long wdf t no? Pamela Brown's ver-dict?

This world, this world, this world isshit.

Weep away, say the angels, gold comes

ftom shit.At least this is the verdict in the

porn, 'This World'. Pamela Brown isnot a poet who rests on definitive state-ments. Her poems are moments-of-thought-and-feeling. It is at times likereading Duras (elegant, passionate,overhung by a late-afternoon drowsi-ness) and Pamela Brown leads thereader into this impression severaltimes. At one point she brings her iden-tification to the fore:

Afte, work,l pour a glass of wine andlook into a mirror likc MargueriteDuras who loolced and saw what alco-hol had done to her face.

This is Brown's eleventh book,her first after a Neu and Selected.It is a

book heavy with complaints - andthis is part of it's interest, part of thewriter's openness to taking risks withreaderswho might dismiss her, or takeoffence. Brown pauses to take stock ofher career:

dreaming away.my loftiest dieamwould be to becomethe kind of poetwho is an ant

insociety's

armpit.the bigproblemis thatalready holfuoyor maybe three quartus

of the way intomy poetic'career' I go unread.

Having read her 1987 prose col-lection, Keep it Quiet, I see that themanner of composition continues here:these poems and paragraphs have theair of odd doodles, scraps of observa-tion, sudden thoughts, moods caught

in mid-flight. They are the bits andpieces that many writers would keepquiet about, or store away as notes formore polished pieces of work. Brown'sobservations of Vietnam, for instance,read like notes from a journal, jottingsfor a possible fuller work of fiction ortravel writing. But as they are they canwork marvellously well:

At night, I awid piles of wet, filthyrubbbh as I cycle along without a light.W omen with huge grass brooms sw eepthe rubbbh from the gutters onto theroad. lt is shooelled into an ancientRussian truck.

Women are Vietnamese technol-0w.

There is a mix of prose-like andpoem-like writing here, without anyself

8/10/2019 'This World. This Place.' by Pam Brown (UQP 1994) reviewed by Kevin Brophy

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My best frimd, tlu communist,was tlu only

real singu in tlu schoolanilhadto sing tluleadin Barbarella the Operetta

(wln was either

larctteTurnq orlarctte Hospitalat tlu tittu,but definitely rct both)

unote tlu lyrics.ln the light of Brown's assess-ment of herself as 'unread', her quotefrom Jame Schuyler that poetry arif-ing is the pleasure, then later callingherself 'Only a poet, / pissing for pleas-ure', the quotation at the front of thisbook becomes a statement of the pecu-

liar difficulties a poet has in contempo-rary Australia. On the one hand, whatis a country without poets? How der-elict would it be? Can we imagine it?On theotherhand, how are thepoets tosurvive without bitterness when theyare either ignored or told to find somereal work to do? [n the face of this thepoet can console herself with the factthat self indulgence is at least pleasur-able.

Now Iforgioe

tlu delicions lunacyWhich maile me uv up all my best

yearsWithout my workbringing any

adoantage otherThan the pleasure of a long delinquency

oachim du Bellay'The Regrets' 1558)But can we do without the poets

who make their couvades for us? Is theimage of a man in sympathetic childbirth as ridiculous as the image of thepoet who speaks for us so that we canknow who we are? In Raids on the Un-speakable Thomas Merton has no doubtthat we are still 'primitive'enough toneed such symbolic and ceremonialacts. For him, the poet has inherited'the combined functions of hermit, pil-grim, prophet priest, shaman, sorcerer,soothsayer, alchemist and bonze'. Tohave poets and then ignore them isperhaps the most ridiculous act of all.ln This W orld/ This Place Pamela Brown

continues to carry off the impossibleact of poetry.

Katn Brophy's forth noael, Harmless Acts, wtll

be publslud later thrs yeat W Neut EndeaaourPress.