AUTHENTIC LOCAL by Pam Brown

soi 3 modern poets,
an imprint of Papertiger Media, presents -


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

This book complements the collection True Thoughts, published by Salt Modern Poets in 2008. Many of the poems here were written in the years between 2002 and 2005 and were put aside whilst compiling the selection for True Thoughts. To read Ken Bolton and Carl Harrison-Ford on True Thoughts click http://linkeddeletions.blogspot.com/2010/04/true-thoughtspam-brown-salt-publishing.html. A number of recent poems are included in Authentic Local alongside the earlier material.

For more information, or to buy a copy of the book, visit soi3 modern poets http://www.papertigermedia.com/soi3-modern-poets/pam-brown.html.

A poem by way of a taster ...

NEWS & SPORTS

by the radio:
I mishear the news and sports presenter
say ‘the latest in nuisance sports’,
outside the light is green,
the lightning frightening stay away
from windows but the storm
takes no notice of me and my black Bic biro
here at the kitchen table
with a new biography of Dante – ‘Dante;
The Poet, The Political Thinker, The Man’ –
I’d just begun reading twenty minutes ago,
the cover image, a detail from a portrait of him,
one book open as he turns
to consult another, open and propped
up against two others, leather-bound,
he has the poet’s leafy laurel twig
tucked into his familiar red headscarf.
poetry is like
tv’s live coverage and if you change
a particle you can arrive at an elegant result
via electronic properties and, probably,
high conductivity in an electrical storm,
but the computer is down and so am I –
my bad handwriting taxes my energy,
how does my brain put up with it ?
(who am I to ask?)
this almost illegible notation driven into
the empty moments between a book
and a book, a poem ‘made in situ’,
the phrase imagined
as a t-shirt slogan or a label
but handwritten


Pam Brown