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PO ET RY Crevasses of doubt Jennifer Strauss Pam Brown TIIUE THOUCHTS *,"il[,'-f }i:f,--lh?i?lr- f-*{ INCE HER DEBUT in 1971, Pam Brown has been \i a consistently intelligent.ur,,i *oguging presence in )J Australian poetry, if too often under-represented in those reputation-establishers, the anthologies. One'prag- matic reason for this may lie in a further element of consist- sncy' the formal structure of her poems. Perems that spin their way down the page, resolutely short-liried, or ones that fragment Iines and thought into zigzau patterns across the breadth of the peg€, are {bithfhl to the characteristics of the New Australian Poetry celebrated in John Tranter's 1979 anthology of that title. They are characteristics that Brown has honed finely over the year$. They are also, fronr the point of view of anthologists and, more porverfully, their publishers, wilfully heedless of that most brutal constraint, the number of pages available for any given anthology. Space can be more generou*ly provided ir, a dedicated volume, especially if elegantly produced, and in readirg this complete collection one becomes aw'{Lre how much the fbr:m allows for the shifts of stance and tone, the play <lf ideas that lend cornplexity *nd shading to an air of spontane- ity, almost chattiness. The latter is manifest in the snippets of conversation, the jokiness, the de-solemnising of high qulture references found, for example, in 'John T phones * / this cloudy gloorny I early s$mmer day I is 'like the fif.ties' he says. / everyday? i miserable childhood? l- plrotographic weather memory / d la recherch,i cht temps inclhment'. These lines liom 'Peel me a zibibbo' may look as if Brown is simply following poets such as Tranter, John Forbes and Laurie Duggan in introducing fellow poets and other con- temporary writers into their poems in a practice presented as radical, though harking back to the poetry of classical Rome. But BrowR's inclusion in the group would have been problematic, fiaught rvith feminist issues of exclusion that inevitably concerned a woman writer in the 1970s. These are re-invoked when this poem ends with the request to a list of male friends, poets, singers, artists ..-eyen Shakespeare - to 'peel me a zibibbo I would you / one of you guys?'Apart froru the title itselt the allusionto Peel Me a l*otus (1959) and the troubled career of Charmian Clift is suggested (obliquely enough) by the explanation in the notes that a'zibibbo'is a grape grown in $icily (an ltalian rather than a Greek island), This obliqueness, reftrsal of the CIvert, avoidance r:f the 'big questions'and large gestures marked the Sydney poets of the 1970s. It was a matter of how to think as well as how to speak. Brown seems to embrace the condition in lines such as oas / the new / gets / newer I I gel l no chasms, no abysses I I get I creva$$es 1 of doubt' ('Augury'); or 'under a nasty sky, i rhetorical uncertainty / dogs me'('Existence'). But this is not the only note struck. Commentators emphasise, and rightly, the ironic eye with w'hich Brown regards the incon* sistencies and futilities of human behaviour: 'we rally fbr peace / we play with the kicls lthe armada heads for the guh" ('Amnesiac recoveries')'Nor are the poet atrd irer activities, or lack tlrereotl exernpt from that gaze. Is it, atler all, possible in this postmodern era tu read Trae Thoughls as other than an ironic twist on the kind of confidently edifying titles bsloved of the Victorian era? Aren't tlre only true thoughts nowaclays those that are Janus-faced, aware even at the moment of conception of being arnbiguous and amtrivalent, always potentially self- contradictory about emotions, evaluations, eyen facts? This doesn't mean we must be 'sherbet-brained, I tizzily beginning to feel i like Nietzche spake * i nothing is worth anything'. These 'tnrthso don't cancel sach other out: they coexist. Take the questian of politics, which figure largely in several of these poems and account for much of the nasti- ness attributed to the sky of,'Existence'. Nnt so much sexual politics as the politics that make wars imminent set bombs and refugees in mntion. V/e rxight think Brown's attitude straightforward enough if we judge solely on this passage from'Amnesiac recoveries' : last century ended after frightening almost everyone with various versions of totalitarianism, too much to be ashamed of as I write as yon read the USA is bombing (pleaseJill in the hlank spuc:es) In 'Worlclly goods', hclwever, we find weariness with 'ergonomic-chair activism' breeding a positive desire to create blanks by deleting unread allthe e-mails soliciting for causes! while in 'No action'. Beckett's dictum 'that politics is useless, / & talkillg politics, worse'is enough to defuse an initial impulse to fill in the blanks, 'ccmbat complacency, / BE political, be GREEN'-that is, until Beckett re-smerges at the end ofthe poem as aman who' underthe Nazis, '{brwent/ the apolitical'to fight with the maquis, not fbr the abstraction of 'France' but tbr the libe*y of friends, becoming 'a person, I any artist or poet / could only hope I to be as I courageous as i or, at most, as definite'. Brown rnight not, then, be pleased with praise of her con- sistency. In these poems, it is contradictoriness, rich source of wit and irony, that lies at the heart of thinking truly. AUIiTRALIAN BOOK REVIfiW .,UNE 2OO9 57
