Drawing of a Swan Before Memory

Browne's work places her amongst the loveliest natural historians of perception: Goethe, Bergson, Lucretius. Like them she knows that ‘description becomes a portrait of not an object but a transference.’ The indetermination and synaesthesia in perceiving here find their register, locating the poem in what remains unbound, to the side of the image. This same oblique site spontaneously invents the ethical, showing that to describe is to honour an unknowable receiver. These poems gently host our plenitude.

* author of The Weather *

In Browne's Drawing of a Swan Before Memory, an incisive meditation whose meanderings surprise and delight, reiteration of words and images invoke a terrain of ever-deepening perceptual events and journeys. The nearly formal modulation of elements that thread through sequences—light - color - courtyard - water - gold - tree - white—lend this poetry the shape of a breathing. Here, personal pronouns float, become a liquidity imbued with the sort of current that elides human with nature, generating expanded paths for both.

* author of Conference *

With Bachelard's ‘surveyor's map of (his) lost fields’ as her memory ground, Browne seeks—through the figures of child, swan, and lover—to recover a wholeness from holographic splittings of recovered film, minute interference patterns in which the hood of childhood is poised as mythic antidote to the lover's body, leaving us with momentary apertures that allow our human longing for permanence to reveal itself.

A consideration of the creation of language and memory. . . . The reader is left to wonder, to connect what is real, what is actual. Recommended for contemporary poetry collections.

Browne's portrait of the acquisition of language is both an inscription of love and a description of arrival. It reveals a great divide between forming and having, embracing formation in loving detail. But before memory, an image has no awareness of itself as image. Before memory, a drawing of a swan is lost in its own blindness. The ambitious project L. Browne pursues here is to trace this innocence, this pure voice, as it unfolds, as it betrays its blindness and becomes experience.

* Golden Handcuffs Review