Phil Brown
As a journalist I mostly write on the arts and entertainment and you can read my weekly journalism in Brisbane News
As an author I write about myself and, if that sounds self-indulgent, you don't know the half of it. Mind you if you read either of my memoirs - Travels with My Angst or the latest, Any Guru Will Do, both published by University of Queensland Press, all will be revealed.
Existential angst reigns in these and both my books of poetry - Plastic Parables and An Accident in the Evening .
Is that a good thing? You can be the judge of that.
Check out my blog to see what’s crossed my mind lately (it’s sometimes a quick trip) and let me know what you think but please, be gentle with me.
Publications:
 Any Guru Will Do -
A Modern Man's Search for Meaning
... click for more ...
 Travels with My Angst
Travel book
... click for more ...
Poetry:
An Accident in the Evening (2001) - Poetry
Sample:
Thoughts While Waiting for a Pizza in New Farm
Sometimes you wonder: what used to be here?
Did ancient forests once cover this joint?
Or was it grassland over undulating hills
running down to the river?
(We hear it was blue, too, once upon a time.
The river, that is)
Sometimes you wonder:
what's under all this concrete?
(Besides the enemies of several generations
of colourful racing identities)
And what was here before
we had cities, mortgages, pizzas?
How fresh the air must have been
when we could run unfettered across the hills
chasing dinner
rather than waiting
to take it home in a box.
read more
Memories of a Mentor: Bruce Dawe
April 2010 - Phil Brown
In the late 1970s, Phil Brown found himself studying at Toowoomba under the tutelage of Bruce Dawe, one of Australia’s best-loved and most respected poets. During the following year and a half, he found himself gradually drawn out of his undergraduate reluctance and into exciting and at times baffling the world of Thomas, Plath, Hughes and Lawrence. In the March edition of Meanjin, Brown writes on the lasting effects of this mentorship, and what it was likely to be taught by one of the true Australian greats. - Read more - click here
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What Phil’s reader say:
These finely-crafted, quirky poems range from evocations of a lost childhood in Hong Kong, through musings about Ernest Hemingway and the watching of contemporary TV, to reflections about waiting for a pizza and feeling sympathy for a solitary, suffering woman on the sidewalk in cosmopolitan, trendy New Farm in inner city Brisbane. Funny, bitter, cool and derelict, An Accident in The Evening is an idiosyncratic and engaging collection of poetry that is fresh and wonderfully liberating.
— Ross Fitzgerald |
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