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).
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