Amy Brown
Amy Brown was born in 1984 in Hastings. She now lives in Melbourne and teaches creative writing at the University of Melbourne, where she completed a PhD in 2012. Her first collection of poems, The Propaganda Poster Girl, was shortlisted for the Jessie Mackay Award for Best First Book of Poetry at the 2009 New Zealand Book Awards. Last year, her contemporary epic poem titled The Odour of Sanctity was published by Victoria University Press. Amy is also the author of ‘Pony Tales’, a quartet of children’s novels published by HarperCollins.
Brown comments: ‘“She wanted the voice of birds” is a fragment from The Odour of Sanctity, a long poem following six candidates for sainthood through stages of canonization. In this excerpt (a chapter from the first canto, “Investigation: the Candidates’ Lives”), Christina Rossetti gives an impressionistic account of her early relationship with God. The monologue is obviously fictionalised, but many of the details (such as Mr Seddon in his “full arabicals”) come from Jan Marsh’s 1994 biography, Christina Rossetti: A Writer’s Life.
‘I wanted the account to seem intimate rather than public; digressive and messy, rather than polished, as a sort of antidote to the Victorian-Anglican ideals of goodness to which Christina had been aspiring since her adolescence. I hoped to let her relax during the monologue and answer questions about her piety inadvertently. In this way, I tried to understand Christina’s belief, to find a level on which I could relate to her fear, guilt and love. This level is mostly earthy and mundane, but it can yield epiphanies, which, broadly, is how I see each of the six candidates for sainthood—recognisably human, but faced with ineffable situations. It is perhaps how I see the “contemporary epic poem” as a genre too: expansive, fragmented and erratic as life, but striving for its classical precedents’ sense of wholeness and truth. In this excerpt I think it’s the tension between wanting the peace of divine wholeness and the exhilaration of human uncertainty that is distressing Christina.’
