James Brown: Favourite Monsters

Reviewed by Penny Bieder

James Brown's first two volumes of poetry (Go Round Power Please and Lemon) are a hard act to follow. This, his third, comes shortly after he was one of four writers shortlisted for the inaugural Prize in Modern Letters.

Brown has risen rapidly to pre-eminence on our poetry scene.

The awards, fellowships and prizes have come pouring in. When he produced Lemon in 1999, Kate Camp wrote that "these poems are political and personal and cryptic and funny and strange, and their freshness is guaranteed" - lines that could also be applied to this latest collection, where allusions, adaptations, fictional locations and lines from popular music lie thick on the ground.

Brown continues an honourable tradition of reworking and rethinking and just plain stealing other people's words. Even the Bible gets a close inspection. Two poems are almost wholly composed of biblical quotations, three others contain respectively three, two and one biblical message. In the Notes at the end of the book, in a friendly way he challenges the reader to find and recognise his borrowings - incidents from his earlier poems are revisited, too.

At 36, Brown is a dazzling and irreverent poet whose words sprawl across the page like a lanky man stretched across a bed. He understands that annoying but apt statement, "less is more", and condenses metres of meaning into centimetres of perfect poetry.

In the poem Southward Ho! when he passes "The stream grumbling decently downhill/like Brian Turner" he glances back to ask, "Are you what you notice?"

In a redemptory sonnet called The Boomers he sees that "The management of change/goes on forever." He looks at the generation before him and perceives that they have lost the plot like everyone else, are making it up as they go along, and finds it strangely comforting.

Snapshot is a sinister poem and I think it's about Lee Harvey Oswald making his date with history . I like this intimation of a moment in time, this abstraction, where an odour can throw you off balance: "He could smell her excitement; / her excitement smelled like boiled clams. / He thought of his mother, her voice pinking down the thread / of her worsted life, his father, marching out of the room."

The shock of discovery, the surprises Brown has in store for readers, the choices he allows them to make about what he might mean, all these cumulate in the poems and present themselves as fun, as challenges, and ultimately as intimate weapons of communication. His words get under your skin.

Manipulative? Maybe: "Like, you know, / everything; like everything is like everything else. / On your behalf, I blame American television."

Funny and moving and full of jokes - certainly. Two lines I especially liked from two different poems: "Your back is different from your front / and you notice this fact in the ranchsliders."

And: "By the time I got home. I was feeling better. / I was through with being cool, / and ready for dinner."

* Penny Bieder is a freelance writer.

Victoria University Press $24.95