True Thoughts

True Thoughts follows the success of Pam Brown's last major collection Dear Deliria published in late 2002 and awarded the NSW Premier's Prize for Poetry in 2004. This new work collects twenty-three poems written between 2002 and 2007 in a period of global instability and military irruption. Even so, this collection of deceptively minimalist poems is anchored in the everyday and moderated by a self-conscious slant to it. The poems move with a clear agency through many realms, both actual and metaphysical. The actual includes sharply delineated streetscapes, imagined havens, distant places, encounters with friends, ideas, history, and a kind of fragmented urbanity. The metaphysical engages multilayered states of being and, sometimes, simple moods. Brown's writing is deftly ironic, and affects a sense of the ludicrous in the face of mortality, as the poems attempt to fathom the question 'how to live?' alongside the larger one 'how to live now?'.