The Propaganda Poster Girl Amy Brown (VUP, 2008), 80 pp, rrp $25. ISBN 9780864735744

Joanna Preston

At its best, this collection is fabulous. In both the literal and the metaphorical senses - poems like ‘The Only Child' and the superb ‘Chichevache' step back from the world we think we inhabit, and pull us through to a much less certain place. And that sense of uncertainty, of dis-location, is the collection's driving force.

            The most obvious embodiment of this unease is found in the book's middle section: a series of poems about the poet's time teaching English in Vietnam. It perfectly illustrates Brown's ability to use external details to convey inner states, and endow the seemingly anecdotal with a more universal resonance - essential for a poet who works in the personal-lyric mode. The sequence begins with first exposure to the new culture ("It is in bad taste / to kiss in public ... and the Vietnamese men stared / at my face as if it were wet / with blood not tears") and the disquiet that comes with dis-location ("watched / the people as if they were an animal / that would ignore us if we kept still"), through the experience of the new becoming strangely familiar ("The night I hear the screams / I take care ... it seems to be what most men do / in Hanoi"), and ends with the wonderfully ambiguous ‘Perfect Traveller', with its web of unanswered questions - who is the traveller? The poet? The girl in the poster? Someone else she didn't notice until it was too late? And did she/they/it get away safely? Great stuff.

            For me, there were two problems with this book. The first is Brown's use of form. There are three villanelles, four sestinas and a pantoum - heavy, repetitive forms that need to be used carefully. They work well for poems about obsession or oppression, and indeed her first sestina (‘Address Sestina') uses the repetition perfectly to illustrate its subject (repeated domestic violence, and being an unwilling witness). The first villanelle and second sestina occur shortly after, as parts 3 and 4 of The Propaganda Poster Girl. Again, they feel appropriate for their subject (although it might have been more interesting to keep the fixed forms for the two parts in the voice of the poster, rather than one for her and one about the man who buys her). But to have another villanelle come in two poems later is too much, especially when the repetitions don't advance the poem. By sestina 3 it's beginning to feel like notches on a bedpost, a suspicion reinforced by villanelle 3, sestina 4 (although it almost works as a sestina) and the pantoum.

            The other frustration is sequencing. Too often poems that want to be beside each other, aren't. The collection begins with the interestingly creepy ‘The Sublime' - a poem about a young woman walking home alone at night, suddenly becoming aware of someone walking behind her. It lays the book's main themes out (being vulnerable, uncertain, female), and she deftly ends the poem before we can find out if this threat is genuine. Perfect! Except she follows it with a mildly surreal, self-consciously clever poem, and squanders the tension. It's a pattern of deflation that you learn to expect. The worst example is saved for last, with the collection's standout poem, ‘Chichevache' (a mythological creature which feeds only on ‘good and obedient wives') being followed by the ‘so what?' of ‘Onepu Road'. "Even when the walls are rotting / the electricity's still on" is a flaccid ending to a poem, let alone a collection.

            Those things are annoyances because this is a good collection, worth reading for ‘Chichevache' and the ‘Propaganda Poster Girl' sequence alone. Missteps are comparatively few, and Brown is a poet who is very good at finding just the right phrase to tip a seemingly ordinary situation into the possibility of something much deeper and darker. Propaganda is the art of making people see what you want them to see. After reading Amy Brown's debut, shadows, footsteps and ordinary young women will never seem quite the same.

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