Lachlan Brown read, and talked about, winningly, his sonnet “Listening In” at ASAL in Brisbane last month, and I ordered his books from Marsden Books that night. They came this week and both confirm all the stirring and sense of pleasurable anticipation “Listening In” set in motion. Established and in the world, Lunar Inheritance (2017) and Limited Cities (2012) are new for me and full of surprises.

Lunar Inheritance I’ll be thinking with for a while longer but, on my second reading of Limited Cities, what’s sticking in memory are all of Brown’s striking similes. Some of these are charming in their unexpected rightness (the job of a simile, yes?): a rubbish truck “setting down its bins / like a triumph of empty glasses”; a train seat snapping shut “like a sharp rebuke or a director calling cut.” Even theorists “lining up late like Thursday / night wheelie bins”. Nice!

Something else is going on in this collection too. A simile is a comparison that, in its vividness, is always admitting to an _un_alikeness, and drawing attention to the way things aren’t identical. As if . . . like . . . as . . . like . . . the chain, really, loops endlessly and never settles. Simile in Brown seems to be a kind of default way of trying to capture things as they are and also experiencing things in motion and fleetingly. That’s partly to do with thinking in and with the suburbs (“this part / of the city that is not / the city”) and thinking in and with trains and commuting and being in between work and home, “somewhere / in between”. Brown is good about these experiences (these are good poems - beautiful poems - to read if you’re interested in trains and public transport and train networks as things of wonder on their own terms), and he’s also a good poet with them. A profusion of similes - of things being like another and admitting their unalikeness, and of suburbs being as and of and like the city without ever quite being the promise of the City - feel, in ways I’m not quite sure I understand yet, to do with the lasting damage of the Howard years, and what that meant for our generation in Australia (we’re contemporaries), and what those long years of low interest rates and big mortgages and politics built on both did to collectivity, solidarity, location. Brown writes of a “chessboard suburb”, where “every lung expands and contracts / with its own economy; each breath another / loan repayment”. There’s a lot of property talk in these poems too, a sign of someone taking contemporary Australia seriously.

Compassion, too, but. I prefer Brown’s “Petrol Stations, or Nine Vouchers Without the Optimism” to Bishop’s “Filling Station” - a poem it is like, and one I appreciate all the more because it prompted me to read Bishop’s again with fresher ears and eyes - because it never lets its humour become judgement, and because it dispenses with optimism for that more difficult quality, Hope. Brown is a poet, I’m sure, reading these poems, determined to believe that Somebody does love us all. The tricky part, in this world, is finding the right ways to make that belief in Him meaningful here, in this world of tollways and hubcaps “left on a / roadside, / spinning like a coin.”