A writer, her doppelgänger, a baby, and a chorus of ghosts all try to get their story straight

Abstract

A writer, her doppelgänger, a baby, and a chorus of ghosts all try to get their story straight Brendan Kiernan Diane Brown. Every Now and Then I Have Another Child. Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2020. 163 pp. US $19.00. ISBN: 9781988592404 Diane Brown's Every Now and Then I Have Another Child evades sentimentalities or poetic pieties. It is far more interested in jokes, in writing itself, in pointing out the absurd self-regard of the writer's cosmos. [End Page 301] Babies tell stories; pictures on the walls give poems to the readers. A doppelgänger bullies her way into a creative writing teacher's house. The heavy stuff will blow you away; the mundane will make you laugh (when is the last time you laughed at poetry?). The rest will bore you. Unlike a romantic poet, Brown does not hold her verse to the titanic obligations of transforming everyday life. Sometimes, morbid jokes and self-effacement suffice in keeping us invested in her world. We play along—we are game to play her games. While a capable craftsperson with poetic verse, Brown invents slippery plot conceits and alter egos to entrap the anguish under all the artifice. Grief, oblivion, and the longing for redemptive love: these are the preoccupations of Brown's impressive, idiosyncratic, and uneven collection. As Brown's collection goes on, you feel more and more that Brown resents the vulnerability and direct confession that poetry obliges. Conventional poetry is like conventional motherhood in her work—noxious, suffocating, tragic, impossible in its demands of this particular poet. In "What's Expected," Brown literally tells us, "I'm not that kind of writer" (57). Indeed, as the work goes on, you see more clearly that the bewildering and inventive world of Diane Brown's poems has been structured around Brown trying to invent a new form of poetry to suit her persona. Her character Joanna Lodge wants to be the unbounded writer who is inured to the cliches and superfluities of the contemporary poet's life, yet she still stews and broods in the tragedies that haunt her. The more I read, the more I see a writer trying to assert herself precisely as she constructs herself. A reader needing to assert him- or herself turns into a drag fast, but Brown's self-deconstructions and self-destructions still feel more fun than poetry should be. You may find that after eighty pages of playful prose poems, you have had plenty of uncommonly good poetry. But then you still have Brown's eighty-page dessert coming your way. This is also by far the least appetizing course Brown offers, replete with a messy mélange of halfhearted murder mystery plots. Once thoughtful, disturbing, and wry meditations on oblivion and loss now have been overwritten by cop interrogations that Brown's gotten tired of writing even as she is writing it. Brown finishes "How We Give Ourselves Away" with an insight that then burdens the work as an extended premise: "Have I stepped over the line/into reality, a murder mystery?" (78). All the moving poems seem to go into hibernation in the latter sections of Brown's collection until her excellent and crafted poem "Yes" near the end of the volume. The Baby poems—narrated by a Baby that Brown has invented—early in the work stun with their macabre beauty. But later in the collection, in "The Manifesto," the Baby narrator stops crying out for love, instead engaging in meta-commentary on other poems in the collection: "The Boy on the Wall wasn't a good fit/for her or this story. The reader/might think it a step too far" (118). Why bring me into this? Brown confirms that she has worn out her welcome with us readers. The serpentine world that she has created in the first part of her work folds into gummy neurosis of the worst kind, an author outsourcing critique to her readers. None of the playful self-regard feels fun anymore. Still, one should take Brown seriously as an idiosyncratic talent. If this collection lost two-thirds of its poems, with a judicious editor biopsying all the murder...