A review of Limited Cities, Lachlan Brown

It is very rare that I receive a book of poetry to review. What a delight though! I love reading poetry, and admire the poet’s ability to play with language, and draw pictures with words.

Lachlan Brown is a young Australian poet who teaches literature at Charles Sturt University. He has been shortlisted for the Blake Poetry Prize, and has benefitted from a poetry scholarship that allowed him to travel through Europe. Much of the material in this collection, Limited Cities, has already been published in literary journals.

Brown grew up in Macquarie Fields, in south-west Sydney, and there are several poems that touch on the riots in that area in 2005: “Next they’re wheeling in the news vans, but kids on bikes crowds out reporters, while the rest of us string together theories about bulldozers and ghettos and why our church has no chance of attracting a minister now.”

As a Christian, Brown sees the world with grace-illumined eyes. He writes poems during Lent (“there are new temptations meaning that you might crash like a house of credit cards”) and Advent (“it’s the season for layoffs”), and mourns the lack of awareness of those spiritual rhythms: However, he is not judgmental.

Brown is interpreting the culture, critiquing the culture, as he writes, but he is also culture-making: writing poems that are celebrated, that also authentically express his faith. My favourite poem comes at the end of this slim volume. It is a six-page epic that was written during a traumatic period when his brother was in intensive care following a car accident.

…                                             intensive care is

quiet like a library            where machines and nurses

speak in lowered tones                 as if death was sleeping nearby

not to be wakened         we’re trying to talk to him

but it’s hard to speak to stillness

…

…                                             I wonder if my brother

will remember Jesus      and that to die is gain

These snatches of phrases do not do Brown’s poems justice, so I will let you taste a full poem, which captures his conversational tone, his acute observation, his pithy descriptions, and his hint of something transcendent:

Today

a bus snatches the air

from in front of you

and a woman gasps

as someone jags across

traffic like a grinning

spark leaping the gap

between plug and socket.

unlike the street the day

is clear and up there

new glass buildings

cooly reflect sandstone

and sky and the white

trail of a jet signing

the heavens with a single

stroke. you wish you had

this kind of style, the

nerve to cut across lanes

or to stand with an

architect’s poise. but

instead you’re waiting for

the lights to change you

into something new.

 

KARA MARTIN is the Associate Dean of the Marketplace Institute, Ridley Melbourne, a lecturer with School of Christian Studies (www.socs.org.au), and Wesley Institute (www.wi.edu.au) and is an avid reader and book group attendee. Kara does book reviews for Hope 103.2’s Open House (www.theopenhouse.net.au).