They imitate John Ashbery. Some of them even look good - twenty years after their first book was published, writing the same kind of poem, over and over. Richly rewarded for being cute.
And that's why I'm worried about Pam Brown. Her poetic voice is gleeful and accessible, so much so I think popularity is her due. Her voice has the cadence of early bebop recordings on a sunny day, though stringently up-to-date with semiotics. I like her wit, and her style. Her language is facile enough to outshine the entire contents of an issue of Vogue magazine, or a half hour of MTV videos. What I don't see is her dark side. And that, for a poet, can be serious. Even fatal.
What she's good at is lists. From song titles to the name of a pizza, she picks up on the absurd details that make our lives go around. With many poems, the reader experiences more than a twinge of recognition. 'Evening' is a good example; technically perfect as a poem, with its sharp line breaks and images seen from a car window, such as "a dazed pedestrian/ hopes to cross/ to the noodle bar". The images, like much of what we see each day, are indicative of ordinary life passing by us - and we're all too preoccupied to care. In the wrong hands, this could be banal. Brown makes it work.
I also like when, beneath the listed image, there's a sly undertone of commentary. A kind of sting. A nudge to the reader, to wake up. There's a brilliant view of a street that has old buildings in 'Another thing coming'.
"its sandstone Victoriana
like a row
of determined invalids
suddenly brought into daylight,
stunned in a gone world."
In a sense, Brown knows all of us live in a "gone" world, full of distractions and disposable objects. This is one of her greatest strengths as a poet. She forces us to pay attention. Even the comforts in our world seem particularly fragile, such as the white ginseng tea in a china cup, noted in the same poems. And also in a poem called 'Lido', there's a lovely moment, like a piece of an 18th century gilded Japanese screen, with umbrellas: ... the glary/white fringes/ of the green & red/ umbrellas/ susurrate."
There's one poem in this book that makes more of a gesture towards the complex world of human relationships. It's called 'Older than Cuba'. However, the toybox of slick images wins out. We don't really know what the bond is between the narrator and Barbara, the woman who died, or why they were friends. As a tribute, it wears thin, and becomes pretentious.
What Pam Brown should avoid is polemic. When she gets political, she's awful. It's clear from the poems in this book that she has not personally lived through a war, suffered from extreme poverty, or endured bigotry. When she takes on the "big themes" the tone becomes shallow and self-serving. It's like hearing yet another person complain that they're sick of hearing about the Holocaust - what, again? Too bad she doesn't understand why people actually need memorials, as in her dismissal of Sept. 11 in 'Ceremonial, poignant'. Perhaps she's only being flippant, skirting an edge, as it were. On the other hand, just the other day, I heard my hairdresser left town because, among other things, she couldn't handle having lived a block and a half away from Ground Zero. Much later, after the Towers fell, she found a grimy, crumpled check from EuroBank in a corner of her living room, something blown in from the window. EuroBank was one of the offices where most of the people died. Or so I've heard.
I like to think Pam Brown would appreciate that detail. At least intellectually, if not emotionally. I wonder how she would feel about finding a check written by a strange dead person in her living room. How she might use it in a poem. Or choose to use it at all. But I don't really know how she "feels" about anything. Her poetic voice is detached from the whole grand orchestra of human emotions, and distinctly proud of it. And in my way of thinking, empathy, compassion for human beings, remains crucial for truly great writing, work that lasts.
(Reviewed by Sharon Olinka, March 2004)
