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'Click here for what we do is a cluster of four loosely connected poems that are not only sceptical of the status quo's serial mendacities and hype but, in a way, they also attempt a coming to terms with the erosion of the idealistic conditions that once made non-mainstream culture, including poetry, so viable and, even, necessary. For Pam Brown writing poetry is a habit, a disorganised ritual. Her poetic inventories begin in everyday bricolage. Real things interrupt the poems the same way thoughts and phrases do. She dismantles monumental intent and then, by mixing (rather than layering), splices the remains into a melange of imagery and thoughtful lyric. Hers is a friendly intelligence that clues in connections to the 'social' as the poems make political and personal associative links. Spurning any lofty design these poems debug the absurdities of contemporary materialism with surreptitious humour. Though disquiet is present it's usually temporary. Here, thinking about the future can be 'trickgensteinian' and yet Pam Brown's poems offer a circumspect optimism.' (Publication summary)
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Works about this Work
-
Jonno Revanche Reviews Pam Brown
2019
single work
review
— Appears in: Rabbit , no. 28 2019; (p. 136-140)
— Review of Click Here For What We Do 2018 selected work poetry -
Andrew Burke Reviews Pam Brown’s ‘Click Here for What We Do’ & Ken Bolton’s ‘Starting at Basheer’s’
2018
single work
review
— Appears in: Long Paddock , vol. 78 no. 1 2018;
— Review of Click Here For What We Do 2018 selected work poetry ; Starting at Basheer's 2018 selected work poetry -
Liam Ferney Reviews Kate Lilley and Pam Brown
2018
single work
review
— Appears in: Cordite Poetry Review , 1 November no. 88 2018;
— Review of Tilt 2018 selected work poetry ; Click Here For What We Do 2018 selected work poetry -
'Cancel the Lot'
2018
single work
review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , August no. 403 2018; (p. 69)'A few pages into this collection we read the line: ‘all of it is lies’. ‘It’ signals the irritation that motivates much of Pam Brown’s writing in click here for what we do. Memory, in these poems, is a problem. Brown’s is very much a poetry of movement: she desires to stay light and mobile, not to be detained by memory (in this way she sometimes brings to mind a serious hiker, weighing the items in her pack by the gram). And yet, she cannot help but take on that extra weight of the past; her present is perforated by it. This dialectic of memory and forgetting runs through the collection. For Brown especially, there is no satisfactory point of rest or synthesis: it is not only memory’s burden that she has to contend with but also the particular ways that the memories of her own generation of sixty-eighters have been imagined and historicised.' (Introduction)
-
Liam Ferney Reviews Kate Lilley and Pam Brown
2018
single work
review
— Appears in: Cordite Poetry Review , 1 November no. 88 2018;
— Review of Tilt 2018 selected work poetry ; Click Here For What We Do 2018 selected work poetry -
Andrew Burke Reviews Pam Brown’s ‘Click Here for What We Do’ & Ken Bolton’s ‘Starting at Basheer’s’
2018
single work
review
— Appears in: Long Paddock , vol. 78 no. 1 2018;
— Review of Click Here For What We Do 2018 selected work poetry ; Starting at Basheer's 2018 selected work poetry -
Jonno Revanche Reviews Pam Brown
2019
single work
review
— Appears in: Rabbit , no. 28 2019; (p. 136-140)
— Review of Click Here For What We Do 2018 selected work poetry -
'Cancel the Lot'
2018
single work
review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , August no. 403 2018; (p. 69)'A few pages into this collection we read the line: ‘all of it is lies’. ‘It’ signals the irritation that motivates much of Pam Brown’s writing in click here for what we do. Memory, in these poems, is a problem. Brown’s is very much a poetry of movement: she desires to stay light and mobile, not to be detained by memory (in this way she sometimes brings to mind a serious hiker, weighing the items in her pack by the gram). And yet, she cannot help but take on that extra weight of the past; her present is perforated by it. This dialectic of memory and forgetting runs through the collection. For Brown especially, there is no satisfactory point of rest or synthesis: it is not only memory’s burden that she has to contend with but also the particular ways that the memories of her own generation of sixty-eighters have been imagined and historicised.' (Introduction)
Awards
- 2019 shortlisted Prime Minister's Literary Awards — Poetry
- 2019 winner ASAL Awards — ALS Gold Medal
- 2018 shortlisted Queensland Literary Awards — Judith Wright Calanthe Award