Judy Brown begins Loudness with reflective poems on personal circumstances and day-to-day living, impressing with her talent for sharp imagery and tidy forms, but leaving the reader unprepared for the outbreak of strangeness in 'The Blackmailer's Wife Reads History and Considers The Nature of Guilt'. Brown's lightness of touch in managing tone and imagery comes into its own in this poem, an imaginative drift anchored to evocations of the moon that charms with its opulent detail and easy manner while avoiding any hint of a context: "Arabesquing over my shoulder at the mirror, I see the Emperor Hirohito / smiling bluishly through the white skin of my arse. (Later a blank canvas.) / My husband says no: it was only mist passing over the security light."

From thereon in, the collection takes on an imaginative charge that sparks many surprises. One of several poems that sidestep cleanly any question as to whether they are exuberantly imagined or vividly factual is 'The Helicopter Visions', with the exhilarating sweep of its ten-minute flight over London. The ending adds an otherworldly twist - "above me the gods are strung like fine chandeliers" - but not before the poem has landed safely on known ground; "All too soon we hang overhead, a thudding / barge of air, settle our weight into the slack, / the landing space. Even now it shakes me / when the crowded colours of earth strike the glass / as we're suddenly sucked down. We spill - / friction hot - into the morning at Willesden."

Brown writes with an unflappable detachment that focuses from a useful distance on whatever she chooses, be it getting the sack ('P45'), drunkenness ('Embittered, A Loner'), macro-economics ('The Crash'), or the candidly unsatisfactory erotic encounters that are equably written off against experience in various poems, most notably 'The Expats'. This is one of a group drawing on Brown's years in Hong Kong, poems dense with brilliantly lit images that register almost incidentally the expatriate's daily experience of being "amazed at novelties of a minor kind" ('Thirst').

There's no telling what Brown will do next, but will be worth reading.

Douglas Houston, Poetry Review Volume 102:1 Spring 2012

Judy Brown's Loudness bursts with vigorous and promising life. She's already the real deal, spreading pleasure and unease in her reader, declaring 'I am trying to settle in this newly numbered world' ('First Footings'), announcing the confusion and bewilderment of her narrators. Many are weirdly convalescent with, for example, 'the reprieve / of a two-moth sick note' in 'Brockwell Park, SE24', but Brown clearly feels this is a condition we will all recognise. In 'The Clash', nerves snap, 'perished as a rubber band', while in 'The Waiting Room' someone is drawn into Van Gogh's lopsided world, where the mind frays 'like a hawser tearing itself in the wind'. This interest in neuraesthenic states does not mislead Brown into sterile surreal or the merely fanciful. Her poems wrestle at the interface between self and other and from the heat of that fight she forges startlingly original imagery.

This is a terrific debut clever, sometimes densely allusive, but never clever for its own sake and never forgetful of its reader.

Poetry London Summer 2012

Lesley Saunders reviews
Loudness by
Judy Brown

Judy Brown’s poetic (though not necessarily her person) thrives on missed footings, lost opportunities, failed relationships, metal fatigue, house-moves, getting pissed. Her self-admonition – ‘Be more interesting’ – in the first stanza of the opening poem is entirely otiose (as one suspects she knows): continuously interesting, thematically, rhetorically and psychologically, is what the book manages to be.
The impasses and embarrassments she finds or puts or imagines herself to be in – this is not poetry to be taken at the face value of confessional – are not only attentively, cleverly observed but also rendered with a deceptive straightforwardness that allows her to manoeuvre words into positions where they can do maximum damage to the reader’s expectations. Here’s the beginning of ‘Dignity’:

Four am in a five star hotel.
The atrium drops beside you
like a turquoise mineshaft.

It goes on:

In the toilet you fall in love
with your own boozy sweetness.
…

And spirals down to this:

…
To be much less than you
should be. In the taxi back, always

the same, hiccups worse than
sobs, your skirt rucked right up.
It feels like an obligation.

As in that poem, Brown has an evident talent for titles, using them to call attention to each poem’s unique existence (though in this collection we are in little danger of just sliding off one poem on to the next); and/or to name what’s in or behind the poem without giving anything away about its nature: ‘After the Decree Nisi’ opens with:

The one who cuts the cake is not allowed to choose

and segues through a TV news item about a man being arrested for videoing female runners taking their clothes off by the roadside, with the poet stopping to wonder if she can empathise with him:

I kind of get it – that he tried to make it his:

the way, beneath their numbered vests, the runners’
bodies flare and split to white against the trees;
the neatness of the moves they make to crouch

and piss, pull up, run on…

before the whole thing comes full circle:

And still I can’t decide –
whether I will cut or whether I will choose.

The poet (again, one makes no assumptions about Brown the person) is a frequenter of cafés that serve burgers with ‘the condiment / still life of Daddies sauce’ on formica tables (‘The Trick of It’, ‘Freefall’, ‘Best Drink of the Day’); of bars and pubs where ‘I sat in The George… riding the smooth Atlantic swell of the afternoon’ (‘Embittered, A Loner’); of waiting rooms, hotel bedrooms, a helicopter and the top deck of a London bus. Places of transit and casual contact, opportunities for having or hearing anonymous conversations, occasions for watching oneself and others: the stuff of poetry’s vocation.
Indeed, I’m beginning to wonder whether these poems are not all, at one level, ‘about’ the act and art of writing poetry. I do not mean this to sound as if the poems are either repetitious or solipsistic, up their own backsides in any way. But take, for instance, the wonderful ‘Spontaneous Combustion’ that starts in medias res:

Later, I learned that someone might enter
a house where the smell of pork, burned-up,
contradicts the cold

– the way an incident of spontaneous combustion is introduced, reported, meditated on and finally turns into an almost-prayer for deliverance feels to me like something that, summoned by the lit match of Brown’s virtuosic imagination, flares ex nihilo into full being and then burns itself out again.
‘Thirst’ does the same kind of thing with the travelogue poem, transforming that staple of poetic subjects, the description of a remembered sojourn abroad (here, ‘Kowloon City’) into a self-reflexive consideration of how such memories get written – depending on what the recollecting eye records – and then over-written by ‘later weather’ that washes away all the names. Instead of reaching for the exotic, stand-out aspects of being in a foreign country (and probably, like most such attempts, failing), Brown is content to note how they were ‘amazed at novelties of a minor kind – / fork-spoon-knife concertina’d in a leather case.’ The ‘he’ who was with the poet (presumably a lover) only briefly condenses out of the misty ‘we’: apparently less memorable now than the stallholder who ‘kicked towards my sandals / a tiny snake escaping from the pak and bok.’ The poem enacts the way such trivial experiences make a habitation for themselves deep in our current dreams, so that ‘Sometimes I wake there…/ and I sit up here…’
I think my favourite poem is ‘If You Smell Gas’, because of its wilful determination not to be trammelled by the conventional reading of routine instructions, but instead to find a way to conjure the genie out of an unprepossessing bottle:

IF YOU SMELL GAS, the devil is close. Do NOT smoke:
show some respect… Sniff again at the pipe’s crusty elbow.
…
Do NOT use naked flames. They will not save you.
…
Do NOT
turn electrical switches on or off. I run things now.

And I love the way Brown writes about sex, like a man but just like a woman – in ‘Idaho’, ‘The Expats’, ‘On the First Night in the Cottage You Said It Was a Mistake for Me to Buy’ and, here, in ‘The Swap’:

‘As the man sat on the steps…

I came alongside in muted shoes, just at the moment
he touched his balls, and the orange-red sluice

of sunset swelled to fill the end of Gleneagle Road
and he whispered a curse he had saved to celebrate this…’

This poet is no victim and picks her way, ‘fluorescent, / into the west’. Any lasting wounds are self-inflicted, and crisply analysed:

I didn’t suss for years. A decade’s passed
since I unpacked and put the Chinese lions
on the fireplace, stony-faced and facing me…

a finger
fits (and not pleasantly) between their teeth….

Ten years’ bad luck. That daily dose of friendly fire.

(from ‘The Souvenirs’)

There’s a restless kind of shape-shifting going on in Brown’s poetry but in a good way – not pseudo-mysticism but the disciplined exercise of a fertile, ironic, troubled, sensuous imagination.

Full review:
http://toddswift.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/guest-review-saunders-on-brown.html