AustLit

'‘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)