Pam Brown, Missing up

Winner of the John Bray Poetry Award in the 2018 Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature

These offbeat, fragmentary yet often discursive poems were written over three years up to spring 2015. In part, they epitomize the absurdities of contemporary materialism. Pam Brown's well-practised scepticism dismantles monumental intent and splices the remains into a shrewd melange of imagery and thoughtful lyric complemented by playfulness. For Pam writing poetry is a habit, a disorganised ritual. Her poetic inventories begin in everyday bricolage. Real things interrupt the poems the same way thoughts and phrases do. You know - the fridge over there, the bus stop, surf music on a radio, a raisin squashed against a floor tile - always backgrounding a connection to the 'social' as the poems make political and personal associative links. Though disquiet is present it is usually temporary - an optimistic wit plays through this idiosyncratic poetry as a kind of placebo. But, in the end, Pam Brown simply lets the language do the work.

'Missing up distinctly interprets traces of the city, the title of each piece effortlessly incorporated into a notational verse structure. Written over three years, this corpus is urbane, parochial, (“disliking Bondi Junction”, 145) and self-deprecating. Brown’s collection is multifocal, irreverent (“the dolt in residence” 93) and cacophonous...' Anne Stuart reviews Missing up by Pam Brown in Plumwood Mountain.

'concise and finely crafted...' Cordite Poetry Review

For over four decades Pam Brown has been active in all kinds of ventures in the multitudinous and continually shifting realm of Australian poetry and in other cultural scenes. Since 1971 she has published many books, chapbooks and an e-book and has been an editor for several magazines. In 2014 she edited ten booklets of new poetry, the deciBels series, for Vagabond Press. She has always held a variety of day jobs but happily avoided a career in any one of them. Pam Brown was born in Seymour, Victoria in 1948. She grew up on military bases in Queensland which possibly 'explains something'. With stints in various local and foreign cities, she has spent most of her adult life living and working in Sydney. She has a blog at thedeletions.blogspot.com and a books site at pambrownbooks.blogspot.com.au