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The title of Joanne Burns' new collection 'brush' highlights the reader's first experience of a poem, its initial electricity; and the way the poem offers a surface of words that proceeds to reveal their possibilities or intentions. The central sequence 'road' is an animated display of the fashions of being in contemporary life - it is cheeky, playful, surreal. Then there is the sequence called 'bluff', which excoriates twenty-first century financial culture with an abrasive hilarity and an eye for the absurd. In a different key, there is a section devoted to personal memoir, including a five-part poem featuring Bondi beach, and a suite of memory fragments depicting twentieth-century modes of travel. The final group of poems, 'wooing the owl (or the great sleep forward)', explores the night, sleep and dreams, with their strange tones and surprising perspectives. The [80] poems are generally short, stressing the concentrated pleasure that only poetry can offer.