Brush

Thetitle of Joanne Burns' new collection brushhighlights the reader's first experience of a poem, its initialelectricity; and the way the poem offers a surface of words that  proceeds to reveal their possibilities orintentions. The central sequence 'road' is an animated display of the fashionsof being in contemporary life - these poems are cheeky, playful, mercurial,surreal. Then there is the sequence called 'bluff', which excoriates twenty-firstcentury financial culture with bite, hilarity and a sense of the absurd. Thereis a section devoted to personal memoir, including a five-part poem featuring Bondibeach, and a suite of memory fragments  depicting twentieth-century modes of travel. Thefinal group of poems, 'wooing the owl (or the great sleep forward)', explores the night, sleep and dreams, with their strangetones and surprising perspectives. There are 80 poems in the collection, most ofthem short, stressing the compressed pleasure that only poetry can offer.