Jane Joritz-Nakagawa's capsule review of Pam Brown’s Endings & Spacings
for The Argotist Online 2021
Endings & Spacings by Pam Brown
Never-Never Books, Sydney 2021
The very prolific Pam Brown has a signature style that she continues in her latest, Endings & Spacings, but each time while maintaining her distinctiveness she comes up with something fresh, new and intriguing. How does she do it? In part I think it is because the world keeps changing and her books reflect the world beyond the reader. In this book people can't sleep and make herb tea in the middle of the night. It seems to be the perfect COVID book－there is a restlessness here, a kind of jazzy improvised feel yet polished. There is a great deal of movement from image to observation, to details then abstractions. The whole thing works very well; I can't seem to get enough of this book－each time I pick it up I find something new and attractive. I feel the world spinning around me as I read this book, like a camera going in a circular motion. Brown is as magnetic witty and smart here as ever as in this excerpt which illustrates how deftly she moves from observations to ideas to reflections to details:
Return to Reviews, or Pam Brown site
'cementing a position
as one of the country's leading researchers
with the launch of a first book
&
a raft of fellowship and grants'
`with wry wit the emperors of the anagram
invent imaginative formal constraints
not decor but credence`
alright then got that
at 4 a m
- - -
white white teeth
ping perfectionist bleats
artist talks
idling
on the lonesome internet
- - -
new romantics rusting in the wine bar
- - -
Every page of Endings and Spacings is a captivating and fun journey into Brown's observations about the world around her and us.
