Limited Cities

Limited Cities is a collection which wrestles with the peculiarities of place, particularly the city and its outlying suburbs, with its vast housing estates and shopping malls and highways, 'where silent graffiti haunts the/ midday breeze where spring/ rain cuts through the sun and/ a rottweiler sleeps outside the/ doors of the supermarket'. These Australian scenes are set against their various European counterparts, with rhapsodies on the Parisian banlieues during Advent and Lent, to a series of Venetian 'postcards', and list-poems set in Barcelona. The poems describe the suburban landscape in a remarkably clear way, finding grace in those parts of them that are often overlooked or derided. Lachlan Brown was shortlisted for the Blake Poetry Prize and is a recipient of a Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship. He teaches literature at Charles Sturt University, Wagga Wagga.