Heather Taylor Johnson reviews Authentic Local by Pam Brown

                for me, it’s useless

            imagining

            a treeless plain,

            then describing it

            continually changing landscapes

            are way     too much

            sickly yellowing weeds,

            bogged gullies,

            cracking surfaces

            pesticides

            ruining pristine reefs

            and so on

                                    (‘Dry Tropics’)

Her landscape rather lies in the urban, where even amid

            a wide broom stroke

            of vomit     and

            puddles of piss

            under the bus-stop bench

we see her fascination with

            piles of shiny

            coloured

            exercise balls

            illuminated to mesmerize

            in the Fitbiz window

                                    (‘City Lights, 6 am’)

In ‘Polka Squares’ she writes

            over 300 photographs

                        lost from my iPhoto

            slide show –

            there go the traces

                        of late 2002 to

            midway through

                                    2004

So memory, too, is tied up in electronics and gadgets, taking the idealism out of nostalgia and smashing it to bits. The closest we come to ‘romantic’ can be found in her musings of poetry and other poets, and the occasional artists and their worlds. It infiltrates her poetry with such persistence that it is no surprise Pam Brown is one of Australia’s most prolific poets. My favourite poem is ‘Day and Night, Your Poems’, which she has dedicated to Ken Bolton. In it she emulates his style, which is partly her own, to try to locate her absorption in reading poetry (his), thinking poetry, and in writing poetry. But even poetry is a slave (albeit a willing slave – so then not a slave – a ‘companion’ perhaps?) to technology, and is there romance in that? In ‘News & Sports’ she writes

poetry is like

            tv’s live coverage and if you change

            a particle you can arrive at an elegant result

            via electronic properties and, probably,

            high conductivity in an electrical storm,

            but the computer is down and so am I –

            my bad handwriting taxes my energy,

            how does my brain put up with it?

            (who am I to ask?)

When the handwritten poem causes migraines, dreamy connotations of the poet’s relation to poetry needs to be redefined. The next poem in the book, having the book’s title, ‘Authentic Local’, follows on with

            bun crumbs in the keyboard,

            the poet writes the whiteness

            of the city

as if not only does productivity in art revolve around the computer, but life is lived around the computer.

There is a certain amount of cynicism in a thematic sense but not so much in Brown’s presentation. I don’t feel a harshness of approach to modernity, nor even a flashing warning, however dull it may be. And to say her tone is ‘matter of fact’ is to say there is a certain dryness to the poems, which I don’t believe is present either. Brown presents us with an acceptance of a fast-paced world which blinks with lights and buzzes with electrical currents, which multiplies cell by cell by cyber-cell and does not wait for us to catch our breath and smell the flowers. There are no flowers. And she is okay with that, just as she is okay with having lived in thirty-six homes. Clearly she has found balance and can embrace a materialistic world as easily as she can write poems on a computer.For longer than some of her readers have been alive, Pam Brown has consistently tried to pin down the impossibility of pinning down in her poetry. But not in an existentialist BIG way; rather in a meandering ‘humph’ way. Has Authentic Local gotten her any nearer to a grounded understanding of a cosmic legitimacy? At this point in her career I don’t think we should be questioning it. I think we should trust in the ticking away of her brain and the furious tapping of her keyboard and relax into her style on page one of this or any future book she will write. It’s a journey – a Pam Brown journey – and if you’re looking out her window, there is such a lot to see.