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Kevin Brophy
Pomelo Brown This World/this
Ploce UQP, Sl6.95pb
Someu)hertwithin this idea of things
there lurks the soul of a brick veneer,
and being a poet in these late capitalist
times is lilcc using anhour glass rather
than a digital watch ... Look at all these
things in this oaerstuffed city . And out
on the perimeters" Neighbourhood
Watch saaes another VCR!
This dumb belief in immortality.
On this side, aneryone liaes as if there
is time to become someone else. Eaery-
one desires asmall couaade. And then,
at
fun*als,they
all simply act as if
someone
furgot
to turn up.
OUVADE? I go to the Concise
Oxford, where I find aquaintly
phrased definition for this curi-
ous word: 'Primitive people's custom
by which husband feigns illness and is
put tobed when his wife lies in.' Putting
aside the assumptions hanging off the
word'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 mentioning
childbirth andlying-in hospitals. Ah yes,
lying-in hospitals.
lnCreating aNation (reviewed in
this issue) Patricia Grimshaw writes
about Melbourne's Lying-In Hospital
(later the Royal women's Hospital)
whictr was established in the 1850s to
serve the needs of young married moth-
ers-to-be. Unmarried mothers were
turned away. Sometimes the unmar-
ried others borrowed marriage certifi-
cates from friends so that they could
lie-in. Sometimes the committee run-
ning the hospital sought permission to
conduct searches of marriage registra-
tions in cases of doubt. We have come
a long wdf
t
no? Pamela Brown's ver-
dict?
This world, this world, this world is
shit.
Weep away, say the angels, gold comes
ftom
shit.
At least this is the verdict in the
po€rn, 'This World'. Pamela Brown is
not a poet who rests on definitive state-
ments. Her poems are moments-of-
thought-and-feeling. It is at times like
reading Duras (elegant, passionate,
overhung by a late-afternoon drowsi-
ness) and Pamela Brown leads the
reader into this impression several
times. At one point she brings her iden-
tification to the fore:
Afte, work,l pour a glass of wine and
look into a mirror likc Marguerite
Duras 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
-
and
this is part of it's interest, part of the
writer's openness to taking risks with
readerswho might dismiss her, or take
offence. Brown pauses to take stock of
her career:
dreaming away.
my loftiest dieam
would be to become
the kind of poet
who is an ant
in society's armpit.
the bigproblem
is that
already holfuoy
or maybe three quartus
of the way into
my poetic'career' I go unread.
Having read her 1987 prose col-
lection, Keep it
Quiet,
I see that the
manner of composition continues here:
these poems and paragraphs have the
air of odd doodles, scraps of observa-
tion, sudden thoughts, moods caught
in mid-flight. They are the bits and
pieces that many writers would keep
quiet about, or store away as notes for
more polished pieces of work. Brown's
observations of Vietnam, for instance,
read like notes from a journal, jottings
for a possible fuller work of fiction or
travel writing. But as they are they can
work marvellously well:
At night, I awid piles of wet,
filthy
rubbbh as I cycle along without a light.
W omen with huge grass brooms sw eep
the rubbbh
from
the gutters onto the
road. lt is shooelled into an ancient
Russian truck.
Women are Vietnamese technol-
0w.
There is a mix of prose-like and
poem-like writing here, without any
self<onscious concern over genres and
boundaries, as there seemed to be in
Keep it
Quiet.
The writer's voice- and
the writer's responses to hearing her
own voice
-
become important, giv-
ing the work a stylish consistency with
room for the unpredictable. One aspect
of this style I enjoy is the rush of uazy,
urban, sometimes gossipy wit which is
also evident in the work of Ken Bolton
(who provides the blurb for this book)
and at times
)ohn fenkins.
It is a sort of
sophisticated anti-art, or anti-
monumentalist art ('modernist novels
have become monuments/what do we
do with monuments?/visit them on
Sundays?'), and irruption of Kylie Mole
monologues (the stand-up comedian
as one face of the contemporary per-
formance poet?). In 'More Miserable
Books Sick & Tired', Brown writes, for
instance, about her old school:
I
anette Turner Hospital
wrote the school song:
unfortunately
it always reminded me
of the Mickey Mouse Club theme
on teleaision
'Burgundy,
blue of the sky,
so.mething ... hold our banner high.
My best
frimd,
tlu communist,
was tlu only
real singu in tlu school
anilhadto sing tlulead
in Barbarella the Operetta
(wln
was either
larctteTurnq
or
larctte
Hospital
at tlu tittu,
but definitely rct both)
unote tlu lyrics.
ln the light of Brown's assess-
ment of herself as
'unread', her quote
from
Jame
Schuyler that poetry arif-
ing is the
pleasure, then later calling
herself 'Only a poet,
/
pissing for pleas-
ure', the quotation at the front of this
book becomes a statement of the pecu-
liar difficulties a poet has in contempo-
rary Australia. On the one hand, what
is a country without poets? How der-
elict would it be? Can we imagine it?
On theotherhand,
how are thepoets to
survive without bitterness when they
are either ignored or told to find some
real work to do? [n the face of this the
poet can console herself with the fact
that self indulgence is at least pleasur-
able.
Now I
forgioe
tlu delicions lunacy
Which maile me uv up all my best
years
Without my workbringing any
adoantage other
Than 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 the
image of a man in sympathetic child
birth as ridiculous as the image of the
poet who speaks for us so that we can
know who we are? In Raids on the Un-
speakable Thomas Merton has no doubt
that we are still
'primitive'enough
to
need such symbolic and ceremonial
acts. For him, the poet has inherited
'the
combined functions of hermit, pil-
grim, prophet priest, shaman, sorcerer,
soothsayer, alchemist and bonze'. To
have poets and then ignore them is
perhaps the most ridiculous act of all.
ln This W orld/ This Place Pamela Brown
continues to carry off the impossible
act of poetry.
Katn Brophy's
forth
noael, Harmless Acts, wtll
be publslud later thrs yeat
W
Neut Endeaaour
Press.
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