Christopher Brown



Christopher Brown Reviews Pam Brown and Nicholas Powell

The last poem of Pam Brown’s Stasis Shuffle, ‘(fundamentals)’ begins with the lines: “make a distinction / between imagery / & reality” (103). As much as the distinction in question evokes the verisimilitude of the fake, a need to separate unreliable image from truth, Stasis Shuffle’s interest in reality and authenticity goes deeper.

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Newcastle revis(it)ed

Tenure – lifting the domestic work-rate for the new shared flat on the beach. AM: stacking dishes vacuuming like watching rage film-clips or Shane MacGowan singing about 80s Newcastle. Minimalism in a pocketbook says write where you are. Empire Park. …

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Christopher Brown Reviews John Mateer

Of the 62 sonnets that make up John Mateer’s João, 58 are given to ‘Twelve Years of Travel’ and only four to the second and final section, ‘Memories of Cape Town’. This weighting emphasises travel not so much as the mode of exception but as regular or even habituated experience, while suggesting only a marginal place for the ‘home’ of Mateer’s South African origins.

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Review Short: Bulky News Press Chapbooks from Andrew Pascoe, Chris Brown and Marty Hiatt

Words and phrases in Andrew Pacoe’s cones, emerge and float through the page’s whitespace like ‘vacuum packed clenches / listing downstream’. It seems that if you were to unfold this book, so that all the pages were arranged on the same plane, phrases would flow from their current position and create new combinations.

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TEXT TOWN traversals i-iv

i. A new regime and daily now we count each step – so much for the flaneur who won’t have seen the street sweepers voided glass attentions to detail the stairs doused stools upturned a-nights three parts smashed heard hours …

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