cover image The News

The News

Jeffrey Brown. Copper Canyon (Consortium, dist.), $16 trade paper (80p) ISBN 978-1-55659-480-9

Brown, a correspondent on PBS NewsHour, records the sentiments of a life spent in TV news in his debut collection. Sardonic, excited, appalled, or simply exhausted, the spare, honest poems at first tell “the story we know to be true.” Brown reported from Haiti after the 2010 earthquake, Beirut during civil war in Lebanon (“Hezbollah by day, Dunkin’ Donuts at night”), and Wisconsin during “Campaign 2012” (as one poem is titled), where “there are twenty-three voters/ yet to make up their minds.” When the headlines recede, Brown’s poetry turns to the old age and death of his father, in a series marked by a moving restraint: “One morning state police/ escort us to your grave/ the next my flight is canceled.// Maintenance issues breaking/ out all over.” Brown’s winning afterword sets the “greedy monster” of his day job beside the avocation of verse—not the same as reportage, but not quite separate from it either. His clear poems blend familiar self-accusation with forthright defenses of his trade: such writing will hold the interest of readers who want to know more about broadcast journalism and the thoughts of a broadcast journalist—one who has done much to put present-day verse prominently on the small screen. [em](May) [/em]