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Poetry

The gleaner

by Gig Ryan
July–August 2013, no. 353

Home by Dark by Pam Brown

Shearsman Books, $23 pb, 131 pp, 9781848612884

ABR receives a commission on items purchased through this link. All ABR reviews are fully independent.

Home by Dark is Pam Brown’s seventeenth book. She has also published ten chapbooks, including two collaborations. Brown’s poems are mostly elliptical, pithy, hewn into slight lines that imply or jest. Each poem manoeuvres and collects the everyday. It is an aesthetic of accumulation, a bricolage that navigates a precarious engagement with the world. Dailiness transmits a poetics of thought in action, as everything is amusingly conjured. Brown favours the outwardly casual and self-consciously records a life of random moments. Distraction and transience become modes of perception, serendipitously curious, as she bundles possibilities, poised with doubt and an embarrassed, ironic reclamation.

 


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Home by Dark by Pam Brown

Shearsman Books, $23 pb, 131 pp, 9781848612884

ABR receives a commission on items purchased through this link. All ABR reviews are fully independent.


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