In Creating a Nation (reviewed in this issue) Patricia Grimshaw writes about Melbourne’s Lying-In Hospital (later the Royal women’s Hospital) which was established in the 1860s to serve the needs of young married mothers-to-be. Unmarried mothers were turned away. Sometimes the unmarried others borrowed marriage certificates from friends so that they could lie-in. Sometimes the committee running the hospital sought permission to conduct searches of marriage registrations in cases of doubt. We have come a long way, no? Pamela Brown’s verdict?

This world, this world, this world is
shit.
Weep away, say the angels, gold comes
from shit.

At least this is the verdict in the poem, ‘This World’. Pamela Brown is not a poet who rests on definitive statements. Her poems are moments-of­thought-and-feeling. It is at times like reading Duras (elegant, passionate, overhung by a late-afternoon drowsiness) and Pamela Brown leads the reader into this impression several times. At one point she brings her identification to the fore:

After work, I pour a glass of wine and look into a mirror like Marguerite Duras who looked and saw what alcohol had done to her face.

This is Brown’s eleventh book, her first after a New 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 readers who might dismiss her, or take offence. Brown pauses to take stock of her career:

dreaming away.
my loftiest dream
would be to become
the kind of poet
who is an ant
in society’s armpit.
the big problem
is that
already halfway
or maybe three quarters
of the way into
my poetic ‘career’ I go unread.

Having read her 1987 prose collection, Keep it Quiet, I see that the manner of composition continues here: these poems and paragraphs have the air of odd doodles, scraps of observation, 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 avoid piles of wet, filthy rubbish as I cycle along without a light. Women with huge grass brooms sweep the rubbish from the gutters onto the road. It is shovelled into an ancient Russian truck.

Women are Vietnamese technology.

There is a mix of prose-like and poem-like writing here, without any self-conscious 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, giving the work a stylish consistency with room for the unpredictable. One aspect of this style I enjoy is the rush of crazy, urban, sometimes gossipy wit which is also evident in the work of Ken Bolton (who provides the blurb for this book) and at times John Jenkins. It is a sort of sophisticated anti-art, or anti­monumentalist 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 performance poet?). In ‘More Miserable Books Sick & Tired’, Brown writes, for instance, about her old school:

Janette Turner Hospital
wrote the school song:
unfortunately
it always reminded me
of the Mickey Mouse Club theme
on television
‘Burgundy, blue of the sky,
something ... hold our banner high.
...
My best friend, the communist,
was the only
real singer        in the school
and had to sing the lead
in Barbarella the Operetta
(who was either
Janette Turner or
Janette Hospital
at the time,
but definitely not both)
wrote the lyrics.

In the light of Brown’s assessment of herself as ‘unread’, her quote from James Schuyler that poetry writing is the pleasure, then later calling herself ‘Only a poet,/pissing for pleasure’, the quotation at the front of this book becomes a statement of the peculiar difficulties a poet has in contemporary Australia. On the one hand, what is a country without poets? How derelict would it be? Can we imagine it? On the other hand, how are the poets to survive without bitterness when they are either ignored or told to find some real work to do? In the face of this the poet can console herself with the fact that self-indulgence is at least pleasurable.

Now I forgive the delicious lunacy
Which made me use up all my best years
Without my work bringing any
advantage other
Than the pleasure of a long delinquency

(Joachim 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 Unspeakable 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, pilgrim, prophet, priest, shaman, sorcerer, soothsayer, alchemist and bonze’. To have poets and then ignore them is perhaps the most ridiculous act of all. In This World/This Place (UQP, $16. 95 pb) Pamela Brown continues to carry off the impossible act of poetry.