'A hoarding Chinese grandmother fills her home with objects, unable to distinguish between the value of things. Meanwhile, her Asian-Australian grandson travels to China for the first time, wary of the revelations that the trip might offer, as he tries to make sense of his own Chinese and Anglo-Australian background. In Guangzhou, Kaiping, Shanghai, and Beijing, amidst the incessant construction and consumption of twenty-first-century China, a shadowy heritage reveals and withholds itself, while the suburbs he knows from back home are threaded into the cities he visits, forming an intricately braided Chinese-Australian inheritance.' (Publication Summary)
Dedication: for my mother, Pauline Brown, with gratitude and tears.
'Questions of identity and self-definition hold a special place in Lachlan Brown’s artistic imagination. His poetry engages with the elusive concept of belonging in a divided and contested world, within and despite social norms and hierarchies. Brown’s poetic impulse is to probe the tensions surrounding the need to self-define and the social prescriptions which label those who challenge normative categories.' (Introduction)
'One of the titles in Lachlan Brown’s new book is ‘(sorites and another traveller’s song)’. The parenthesis is a sign of casual deflection. The title of the poem is an add-on. It could be something else. But actually it provides a good description of the whole, which is a lyrical reflection of a journey and a heap of other things. ‘Sorites’ means ‘heap’, referring here to hoarding—the poet’s grandmother’s literal obsessive hoarding, as well as the metaphorical hoarding of memories, stories, observations and associations that make up (this) poetry—and conceptually to the paradox of a heap. Does a heap stay the same as things are added to it or taken away? When is a heap not a heap but just detritus, nothing? For a certain kind of contemporary Australian poetry, of which Brown’s is an appealing example, this is a problem of situatedness, of inheritance.' (Introduction)
'‘Toward dusk,’ writes Brown in the book’s penultimate poem, ‘when the sky is passport blue, / you return via the National Performing Arts Centre, / its vast half-egg reflected in the stirring water.’ This poem, ‘Blank face double vision’, is reminiscent in certain ways of Lorca’s Poet in New York. Both Brown and Lorca use the phrase ‘blank face’ as well as the word ‘egg’. Also, both Brown’s poem and Lorca’s ‘After a Walk’ – like Lunar Inheritance and Poet in New York in general – evoke a sense of alienation within an anonymous, urbanised environment. Whereas Brown’s ‘half-egg’ is a realist description of the National Performing Arts Centre in Beijing, Lorca’s ‘egg’ is a surrealist image of anonymity: ‘With the amputated tree that doesn’t sing / and the child with the blank face of an egg.’ Lorca’s portrayal of a nature-less conurbation is, in many ways, somewhat more unsettling than Brown’s depiction of metropolitan China, but both books are similarly formed around a poet’s wanderings through foreign cityscapes.' (Introduction)
'Lunar Inheritance is Lachlan Brown’s second collection of poetry. His first, Limited Cities, was published in 2012 by Giramondo, and was highly commended in the Mary Gilmore Award 2014 for a first collection of poetry. Brown was born and raised in Macquarie Fields, NSW, and is currently based in Wagga Wagga, NSW, where he works at Charles Stuart University as a Lecturer in English.' (Introduction)
'Questions of identity and self-definition hold a special place in Lachlan Brown’s artistic imagination. His poetry engages with the elusive concept of belonging in a divided and contested world, within and despite social norms and hierarchies. Brown’s poetic impulse is to probe the tensions surrounding the need to self-define and the social prescriptions which label those who challenge normative categories.' (Introduction)
'Lunar Inheritance is Lachlan Brown’s second collection of poetry. His first, Limited Cities, was published in 2012 by Giramondo, and was highly commended in the Mary Gilmore Award 2014 for a first collection of poetry. Brown was born and raised in Macquarie Fields, NSW, and is currently based in Wagga Wagga, NSW, where he works at Charles Stuart University as a Lecturer in English.' (Introduction)
'‘Toward dusk,’ writes Brown in the book’s penultimate poem, ‘when the sky is passport blue, / you return via the National Performing Arts Centre, / its vast half-egg reflected in the stirring water.’ This poem, ‘Blank face double vision’, is reminiscent in certain ways of Lorca’s Poet in New York. Both Brown and Lorca use the phrase ‘blank face’ as well as the word ‘egg’. Also, both Brown’s poem and Lorca’s ‘After a Walk’ – like Lunar Inheritance and Poet in New York in general – evoke a sense of alienation within an anonymous, urbanised environment. Whereas Brown’s ‘half-egg’ is a realist description of the National Performing Arts Centre in Beijing, Lorca’s ‘egg’ is a surrealist image of anonymity: ‘With the amputated tree that doesn’t sing / and the child with the blank face of an egg.’ Lorca’s portrayal of a nature-less conurbation is, in many ways, somewhat more unsettling than Brown’s depiction of metropolitan China, but both books are similarly formed around a poet’s wanderings through foreign cityscapes.' (Introduction)
'One of the titles in Lachlan Brown’s new book is ‘(sorites and another traveller’s song)’. The parenthesis is a sign of casual deflection. The title of the poem is an add-on. It could be something else. But actually it provides a good description of the whole, which is a lyrical reflection of a journey and a heap of other things. ‘Sorites’ means ‘heap’, referring here to hoarding—the poet’s grandmother’s literal obsessive hoarding, as well as the metaphorical hoarding of memories, stories, observations and associations that make up (this) poetry—and conceptually to the paradox of a heap. Does a heap stay the same as things are added to it or taken away? When is a heap not a heap but just detritus, nothing? For a certain kind of contemporary Australian poetry, of which Brown’s is an appealing example, this is a problem of situatedness, of inheritance.' (Introduction)
