Authentic Local, Pam Brown

"Pam Brown’s poetry attends to the soundbites and transitoriness of contemporary Australian life. Her dazzling wordplay gives us glistening souvenirs of overblown politik-speak, uncontrolled Western consumption, and the daze of the habitual and housetrained. Rather than timeshare the modernist experiment, Brown moves beyond its heroics and fashions a commentary that is understated, down to earth, and unsettling. While questioning its own title, what remains marvelled at in Authentic Local is the colloquial and its uncanniness, the utopic harbour glimpse of a home language."

- Ann Vickery

Excerpt from the book

SPRING

foyer’s cat-sprayed dado walls
welcome mat in tatters
a neighbour announces
the first cockroach
of spring

fresh southerly change
chance of a shower
tell the dirty sacred ibis
feasting on boutique rubbish
from the skip
behind the Italian deli
to wing it

oddly elegiac
turning on the variety show’s
latest episode
garden power reigns supreme
blue collar sensibilities
fill each fresh poem
and minds meet

INDIAN SUMMER

a koel calls
two a.m., the
traveller’s clock
ticks two ten

the sodium glow
of the city

a trickle of tadpoles
in the fake creek
below a concrete
mont blanc
at the outdoor
model railway display

free home devilry,
a seagull
and a crow
in Fitzroy

big and clumsy,
brush-tailed possums
on the roof
at daybreak

can’t fathom
the deep sky,
we’ve forgotten
how to find
the southern cross

Bio

Since 1971 Pam Brown has published many books of poetry, including, more recently, Text Thing in 2002, Dear Deliria in 2003 (which won the NSW Premier’s Award for Poetry) and True Thoughts in 2008. She is the associate editor of Jacket magazine and her poetry and other writing has been published widely both in Australia and internationally. She has written reviews, essays, film scripts, and performance texts. She has earned a living variously and, until 2007, spent sixteen years engaging in the pleasures of classification as an employee in the life sciences library at the University of Sydney. Born in Seymour, Victoria, she grew up on military bases in Toowoomba and Brisbane. In her imagination Pam Brown lives in Zlin, Moravia. In real life she is currently living in Blackheath, just west of her chosen home city, Sydney.