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14x21 cm, 22 pages, 250 gsm "Natural" Strata card cover with colour illustration, black endpapers, hand sewn with navy twist. 
 

ISBN 1 903090 36 9  

The cover illustration shows the sky dome taken with an all sky camera

Pam Brown fled Sydney for the duration of the Olympic Games in September 2000 and spent almost a month visiting the Indian Ocean islands of Mauritius and La Réunion. In the following year she spent three and a half months travelling in Hawai'i, Québec, Berlin and France. The poems in 'eleven 747 poems' are some of the poetry written on those journeys. The term "747 poem" was coined by the North American poet, critic and academic Rob Wilson, meaning the kind of poem written during a brief stay in a foreign place.

Contents
Mascarenes
Counting Day
St Expédit
Come and Buy Shop
On La Réunion
At the volcano
From Manoa
Montréal
In Brittany
The Paris Bit
What Next?

See below for biographical note and extract.

Click here for Pam Brown's website

Ordering Information

 Biographical Note:

Pam Brown has published thirteen books of poetry including 50 - 50 (Little Esther Books, 1997). Her Selected Poems went into a number of editions. A new collection, Text thing, is due from Little Esther in Spring 2002. She has also made screenprints, films, video and theatre. To quote the Australian poet, critic & publisher, Ken Bolton, she is "a longstanding member of that disorganised band, the radical opposition in Australian poetry". In 1993 she was a guest of Festival Franco-Anglais de Poésie in Paris, France andin June 2001 she was a guest at the Berlin International Literature Festival. Born in Victoria, growing up in Queensland, she now lives in Sydney. Since 1997 Pam Brown has been the poetry editor of overland magazine.


from eleven 747 poems

Mascarenes

preferring the gist
         to the opus,
on return,  I wonder,
   if this was a foreign country
         would it be more interesting
   to be here ?
      to be finally asleep
& dreaming, like yesterday,
           the day lost to jet-lag,
                                 in French -  
 "je suis perdue"
             & must find a place
                   called "rue Guibert"
   where, in waking life,
            I've never been,
                        nor heard of,

imagining
     the spicy Indian Ocean air -
             the constant alizés,
  trade-winds
         that drive you crazy
  buffet the house,
            the mango trees,
   & knock
       big juice-logged jackfruit
             to the mulchy ground

looking for traces
   of Charles Baudelaire’s
            exotic fabrications
 in some tropical
               banana flower,
   liane de jade, reeking vanilla,
   or Johnny Walker bottles
            filled with honey
at lunch-time
  at a waterfront camion bar,
or maybe in the loquats
        & Malabar samoussas
  from the sleepy street seller
         just near the mosque

                everything here
from long ago,
    the ancient erupting volcano,
everything
     except the cars, satellite tv,
  play-stations, the world wide web,
net-draped cliffs,
    unadorned concrete
       anti-cyclone construction,
every other mouldy thing
              - 17th, 18th, 19th centuries

Leconte de Lisle’s nose
                                        knocked off the statue
     in the church square
where a slender Créole
      picks take-away scraps
from white pvc boxes
   in the bin,
 she must have fucked-up
& slipped past
      welfare enslavement

   born here, buried here,
Leconte de Lisle,
        that old Parnassian -
the hymns and odes
inspired by steam power
and electric telegraphy
leave me cold
     pure art or social art ?
        that hesitation
quickening
       young Rimbaud’s disgust

Baudelaire, 
                  at 20,
     persuaded by his parents
   to take a voyage
 meant to temper wildness,
to save him, said the step-father,
    from “the sewers of Paris”
           when shall we set sail
           for happiness

       he squibbed, years later,
and invented the east
     he never reached -
 ditching
           the journey
for these two small islands -
               îles Mascareignes

in Pamplemousses Garden
     by the long rectangular pond,    
   giant, flat Victoria Regis lily pads,
  Baudelaire writes his poem
   to a Créole woman
                 of rue Guibert,
Port Louis,
                I write mine
                in St. Denis.