Garment for a Long Journey celebrates the body of work of California poet LoVerne Brown (1912-2000), whose writing career spanned the late 1920s to the late 1990s. Poems from three earlier collections of her poetry are included in this volume, along with additional loose poems, some never before published.
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“Opening this book by LoVerne Brown is like opening a tall jewelry chest filled with rings and bracelets, pendants and pins, fashioned from silver and gold and set with precious stones. Her lyrical poems offer unique views of ordinary events. Metaphor and simile sparkle like faceted gems held in bright light. She creates stunning art from everyday occurrences. Among her poems I believe you will find friends for life.”
—KEP, AKA Kathleen E. Peckham
“Reading one of LoVerne’s poems at the start—or the end—or the middle—of my day just lifts me up and hands me a little momentary treasure. One page makes me laugh, another opens my heart to the strength and frailty of being human. I’d forgotten how easy it is to love poetry, especially when written with the sensitivity of LoVerne.”
—Rita ElWardi
“Her poems are brilliantly made, often bitingly incisive portraits, often politically engaged. She had a wonderfully sharp wit and a keen sense of the underbelly of human behavior. Her poetry, like her life, was full of love, but her poems were much more sharply edged and never sentimental or simplistic.”
—Steve Kowit
LoVerne’s Work Was Featured in MacQueen’s Quinterly
http://www.macqueensquinterly.com/MacQ5/Brown-Consequence.aspx
LoVerne Brown’s Poems and Ed Ruscha’s Artwork
Two of LoVerne’s poems were featured in the June post of Lines of Thinking, a monthly feature from College President Emeritus Tom Manley. Each installment features a poem selected for its powers to transport us to some higher, lower or common ground, and, possibly in the process, provide fresh perspective and insight on the ground we occupy daily.https://antiochcollege.edu/2021/06/brown-and-ruscha/
LoVerne’s Friend Wrote Her from an Internment Camp During WWII
A letter written to LoVerne by a friend who was in an internment camp during WWII has been published and it’s fascinating. Click below to read the letter.
Brandon Cesmat has reviewed Garment for a Long Journey: The Collected Poems of LoVerne Brown and rated it  LoVerne Brown’s The View from the End of the Pier is one of the best books to come out of San Diego. Bringing it back into print in Garment for a Long Journey: The Collected Poems of LoVerne Brown along with Brown’s other books and unpublished work makes the book a major event for poetry. While “Meeting of the Mavericks” might be her most famous poem (immortalized in The Maverick Poets, edited by Steve Kowit in 1988), her “Wild Geese” has become my touchstone for loss: “the perfect rose came perfectly apart,/tossing its petals into a spiraling wind.” The perfection in Brown’s poem is not just her euphony, but her ability to compress language and still get her arms around the multifaceted nature of a person or event. As with so many of Brown’s poems, the narrative has verisimilitude (When Brown’s husband died of a heart attack in 1952, Brown became a single parent long before women had the civil law protections against discrimination at work or in housing). ”The Rapist’s Child,” on the other hand, is a long narrative poem that gives compulsory pregnancy the long, concrete look that the topic seldom gets. When we think of Brown whose life spanned 1912-2000, we get a pre-Roe v. Wade perspective. “There was no way to tell you,” the narrator says, nevertheless telling her husband. “It was all locked up in my head….” Poetry is not always a key in these poems. “The Rapist’s Child” ends with an honest lie, honest because it clearly delineates the limits of love. Brown’s love of poets comes through in the number of poems addressed to other poets. Many of them, such as “The Life of a Minor Poet,” were sprinkled throughout her earlier books, but Garment for a Long Journey introduces a new section titled “Poems About Poets and Poetry” that shows Brown’s practice of using the writing form for the people who appreciated it. One particularly beautiful new poem is “For Wanda Coleman.” Although Coleman is often thought of as an LA poet, Coleman read in San Diego frequently, perhaps because her in-laws Franklin and Roselyn Strauss ran the Poets’ Circle in Ocean Beach, which Brown was a member. “Some books bleed /when hands touch them,” Brown writes. While she is writing of Coleman, she might as well be writing of her own books. Even on this quiet shelf I see them throbbing. blood pools, thickens, spills heavy as summer rain on the books below– those other offerings pale anemic so needing this transfusion that comes too late– I should have bought you sooner. What Brown thought Coleman’s poetry might have brought to hers remains unstated. Both poets wrote with an edge. Without doubt, poetry flowed through Brown. New sections include poems for her family and humorous poems, poetry of everyday use. Her wit cut fast and clean, as in “Modesty Is Where You Find It”: Our theater’s gone porno; the window shows a crowd of topless girls. The sign below reads, “No bare feet allowed.” At some point, a book about Brown’s life as a working widow needs to be written. Despite her long career with the City of San Diego, Brown came from that generation who lived at a time when a single-women were denied home loans, yet she never used her poetry to attack this personal injustice. Instead, she takes on the larger system in poems like “Shell Games,” a devastating poem about the devastation wrought by the status quo. The poem focuses on a father, Chandler, nothing like Brown, but her empathy for him in the scope of his life compressed into the poem is a mark of her poetry. “Shell Games,” is one of the many poems in the book that “bleeds.” One of the new poems, “The Runner” maintains that empathy to the edge of her own life. The poem tells of an encounter with an old friend who has lost her mind. I once asked Brown if she’d seen Roselyn Strauss. She and her husband Franklin Strauss ran the OB Poets’ Circle, which had been the energetic core that spun off Kowit, Terry Hertzler, Jesus Papoleto Melendez and Brown herself. Brown said that although Strauss still walked around OB, she was “gone” in her mind. Strauss had lost poetry. “The Runner” sounds like Brown’s attempt to reach Strauss and bring her readers as close to edge as possible. The think of a poet writing “The Runner” so late in life is daunting but, nevertheless, an excellent example of how long a journey Brown was willing to make. Grament for a Long Journey is a book that shows if you write away from yourself, you can’t help but take yourself farther than life allows. |
LoVerne Brown 