Tag Archives: Brook Emery

Brook Emery: Sea Scale: New and Selected Poems

Posted on by Martin Duwell

Waratah, NSW: Puncher and Wattmann, 2022, 291pp.

Since I’ve written about Brook Emery’s last three books – Uncommon Light, Collusion and Have Been and Are – individually (the first two reviews can be found on this site) I don’t want to be guilty of too much repetition and so here I’ll focus on the new poems that accompany this selected and also, at the same time, I’ll try to explore some general issues that apply to all of Emery’s output. The new poems are begun with an extended set called “Self Portrait: Provisional Sketch” and concluded with another set “Self Portrait: Sea Scale”. This piece of structural organisation in miniature encapsulates something that can be seen as a crucial dynamic within all of Emery’s work: the tension between the reasonably aleatory processes of the mind that his work has always acknowledged and the desire to impose some kind of structure or order on the poetic expression of it. This could be rephrased as a tension between process and the creation of an aesthetically satisfying object. Process poetry – “I do this, I do that” – responds to the fluid nature of our lives, both mental and physical, in the world, but must, by definition, avoid those aesthetically pleasing structures that poetry, like all the arts, inclines to exploit: balanced juxtapositions, for example, or conclusions where the rhetorical level of the language is heightened.

You can see a lot of organisation going on at the macro, book-structuring level throughout his work. In the most recent book, Have Been and Are, all the poems apart from the last have poetic (or semi-poetic) epigraphs and the poems respond to these and employ them in varying ways. (It reminds me of the sequence, “Improvising with Flaubert”, from Emery’s first book and raises the general issue of the way in which quotation and literary allusion – sometimes at a very faint, gestural, level – are part of Emery’s poetic personality: the dailiness of life for anyone in the literary world involves the continuous entry of other literary texts if it is going to be honest about what goes on in the mind when the subject is going for a walk or washing dishes.) Collusion, the book preceding Have Been and Are, is imagined as a dialogue with a figure, K, and intersperses long meditations with short poems about what is happening at that moment in the local environment, a structure that recalls Bruce Beaver’s Odes and Days except that long and short are kept in separate compartments in that book. Uncommon Light was built around the tension between the human move to transcendence (to a divine light) and the horrors of human viciousness. Misplaced Heart, Emery’s second book, is structured in six sections, each with an introductory sonnet that begins with a metaphor for what the mind is: “The mind is a misplaced heart” is the last of these. Finally, even And Dug My Fingers in the Sand which might, as a first book, have been nothing more than a collection of successful pieces, has a strong six-part structure in which the opening poem of each part is also the title of that part. On top of this the first and last poems are seven-part sequences and thus have a similar balance to the two self-portraits which bookend these new poems.

All this argues for a strong impulse towards formalism in Emery’s work and a heightened sense of how units can be deployed to create an effect – an effect of aesthetic satisfyingness or conceptual unity – on the material at hand. And very often the material at hand is the opposite of satisfyingly shapely because it wants to follow the processes of the mind as it responds to particular stimuli. The two “Self Portrait” poems are a case in point. The first of them seems to imitate the random connections the mind makes when dealing with a theoretical issue:

How then shall we proceed? Word by word, fearlessly,
cautiously, line by line, one foot after another, again
and then again, seduced by the pull of a sentence
(as Marianne Moore would have it) into near and far,
where an umbrella and a sewing machine
circle uneasily on a dissecting table: implausible,
but interesting none-the-less. I write now
what I couldn’t write before or after, the inner
out of oneself, out in the world, write myself
as other in the “I”, doubling, tripling,
twisting in and out of shape. Reason is all we have,
reason lets go, is not near enough. Consider the body
and its out-of-body, the between where unknown waits.
I make my memories now, the gut a second brain,
skin a free-trade zone where words are coins.

In a way the centre of this poem is the reference to the umbrella, the sewing machine and the operating table. It derives from Lautreamont’s Les Chants de Maldoror and was taken up by Breton as a surrealist position: a total lack of conventional aesthetic shape in an idea can still produce an exciting juxtaposition. In Emery’s poem it stands for one kind of shapelessness – the result of free-associating and letting the words generate the meanings – and his embrace of it is accepting but cool: “implausible / but interesting none-the-less”. The rest of the poem focusses on the nature of the writing “I” and its relationship to the “written I” before finishing by making a gesture towards the mind/body dichotomy of Western philosophy and thus introducing one of Emery’s persistent themes: What is the mind and how does it work?

Having made this distinctive start in pursuit of a self-portrait, the other eight poems in the sequence explore various parts of the problem. The second poem, for example, treats of the dangerously attractive nature of words themselves and its introductory statement,

“Lugubrious”, there’s a word to conjure with,
what a mournful mouthful, which brings to mind
“lucubrate”, “lubricious”, “luscious”, but this 
could go on forever: pellucid, lucid, limpid,
even Lumen Scientiae that long-forgotten motto
of my old school where we studied Latin, French . . .

suggests the way the mind moves from one topic to a related one quite casually. It’s a movement repeated in the passage I have quoted above where out of the sounds of words arises the motto of his old school which then leads to memories of himself as a language-learner and -user before returning to the lubricious attractiveness of words themselves:

             “Bamboozle”, now that’s a word!
What might be its derivation, who might have
coined it? Should I look it up or let it be its own
hypnotic, almost onomatopoeic self? “Hornswoggle”,
boondoggle, befuddle, lollapalooza.

I want to say that the other poems of the sequence spin out from this initial concern with self and language but the metaphor “spin out” begs the question in that it assumes a particular relationship between the elements, as though the poem were structured as a developmental set of variations. Reading “Self Portrait: Provisional Sketch”, one has a stronger impression of a mind hopping almost arbitrarily among its themes, operating, in fact, as a mind rather than as a conventional poem does. Emery’s poems always have a strong forward drive and this is another way in which he seems to be a successor to Bruce Beaver, but whereas the drive behind Beaver’s poems, their skill with enjambments and long syntactic units, seems to come from an aggressive assertiveness, Emery’s poems seem driven by questioning and restlessness. No-one so consistently asks questions and the appearance of a question doesn’t weaken the drive but rather strengthens it, even when the question is just something that the mind produces as part of the way it plays over reality. Take the opening of the sixth section:

Can the mind be simultaneously consistent and complete?
The answer may have passed this way, may be hiding
in the words, erased and re-worked, erased again,
the derivative masquerading as original,
perpetually pitoning up the same sheer mountain face,
perpetually slippery-sliding down again, confounded
by the impulses of the heart, the temptations of the eye,
the doublespeak of distinctions with very little difference.
Is it possible to be a body without a mind,
or a mind without a body? Come, you Greeks,
come Descartes, to my assistance! Is it
matter within mind . . .

And so on, the tone recalling an earlier passage, “Is metaphor inimical to thinking / or essential? Ask Hobbes, ask Vico, don’t ask me!” There is nothing formally philosophical about this. It’s not pompous and it doesn’t aim for the serenely denotative of, say, late Stevens but instead confronts a series of issues stirred up by the mind as it considers ways in which its owner (or partner, or slave) could begin to make a portrait of himself. But to return to the issue of thought and form and the question of what shape the processes of thought have in Emery’s poetry, whether they have an aesthetic quality in themselves or must wait for one to be imposed, one part of “Self Portrait” seems to suggest that Emery thinks that the latter is more likely. A self-portrait is going to involve some kind of recreation of the past when the self was a child. Of course, as all autobiographers know, to describe one’s own past is to recreate a past self from the perspective of the present self, a process of “doubling, tripling” that Emery speaks about in the first section. The past appears in the poem’s fifth section and it is deliberately introduced not as a logical component of a self-portrait but as a random association produced by some hot weather:

Today, we huddle inside, wish for air-conditioning,
wish for fans, complain of February’s heat
as though it wasn’t always so, and suddenly 
it feels like 1959 again: the Bondi tram
is running on time, and the one down the cutting
to Bronte Beach; milkshakes are malted
and come in metal cups; milk is delivered to our door
by horse and cart . . .

And in a later section when the past is considered – “We used to eat Chiko Rolls, Sargents Pies, / Pluto Pups, Polly Waffles, Rainbow Balls . . .” – it’s subsumed in a comparison of the processes of cultural change so that the self of the poem is “out of time”: in not podcasting, blogging, or following people on Twitter, Emery describes himself (as many of our generation might) as “an analogue fish flummoxed in a digital sea”. The point I’m making here is that what one might expect to be a solemn attempt to recreate one’s past in all its sensual preciseness is allowed to slide into a predictable lament for the speed with which things have changed. If this seems a rough judgement, it can be said to be confirmed by the opening of the next section:

I seem to have gone a bit skew-whiff
in the aforesaid. Despite my intention, this poem has become lament,
a debased form trailing threads of self-indulgence
and nostalgia . . .

All of this analysis is really just an attempt to argue that the basis of Emery’s poetry might be an alertness to process in the form of observing and recording the movements of the mind. And that this produces material that although it has no aesthetic shape in itself, does fulfil one requirement that most of us hope that the aesthetic does: it is true to reality (I’m aware that there is a considerable literature in which poets have argued that the best poetry is the “most feigning”). The shape has to be imposed and this can be done at the macro level by a good deal of organisation and at the textual level by a mode of writing very sensitive to the questions that drive it on. The fabric of the verse is also thickened by a strong tendency to quotation. Again it’s a technique that might derive from Beaver’s Letters to Live Poets (a book celebrated in an early poem from Emery’s first book) where quotations are inserted frequently, although in Emery’s case they are acknowledged quotations. And, as I have said in the beginning, it is no more than an accurate and truthful representation of the processes of a literary person’s mind. Quotations, whether entire and acknowledged, or mere syntactic gestures (as in the “trailing threads” of the last quoted passage which is an ironic glance at Wordsworth’s “trailing clouds of glory”) are not intrusions or showings-off but part and parcel of the way in which a mind like this works.

In keeping with the desire to structure at a large level, this book-length group of new poems finishes with another approach to the issue of self-portraiture. Unlike the first, which begins with a mix of first principles about conceiving and describing oneself – language, text and perspective – this final poem, “Self Portrait: Sea Scale” is located in the sea, an element which in the work of another poet might herald a commitment to a grounded life but which, in Emery’s poetry is a symbol of reality in a permanent state of Heraclitean flux. Matter, as another poem says, “is movement – / restless, oscillating particles tensely bound”, and we merely “live on the fringe, not at the heart of matter”. Also interestingly, this longish sequence has two human characters: the poet in the sea and a man “on the shoreline / facing the horizon” who performs a complicated and ultimately uninterpretable dance cum exercise. I’m probably skating over a lot of complexities here but it is hard not to read the existence of the two humans as an example of the doubling that the first sequence, “Self Portrait: Provisional Sketch” spoke of. I read it as an expression of a double existence: the first in the sea of “reality” and the second – standing on the shore between the flux of the sea and the solidity of the rocks that lie behind the shore – making the equivalent of poems in his body motions. At any rate the final poem of these new poems wants to end on a note which is simultaneously upbeat and undeceived about the inevitable processes of temporality. It begins by quoting Issa’s famous haiku which, in a few words, encapsulates the human response to flux by art:

What unfolds here, unfurls, is grace
(On a branch / floating downriver /
a cricket singing). I give thanks
for joys which come unbidden,
which cradle the uncommodified body
in a caress which could as easily kill.
I will take the devil’s deal for more of this,
for the dance, the sounding beauty, knowing always,
that I will surely end.

Many of the other new poems are brilliant. Again, as we expect by now, they are carefully divided into groups by theme and each section is marked by a three line poem which responds to the group that has gone before (the first “Self Portrait” group, for example, is followed by “Devote less time, O Poet, / staring into the mirror: / you can’t write your own reviews). The first of these groups is very much in Emery’s mode of philosophical speculation and its first poem, “Rendezvous” is devoted, yet again, to describing the odd and unpredictable movements of the mind. As a poem, it is structured around four descriptions of mind, beginning: “that dematerialised, invisible thing, / swaying like a ship’s light in a storm, / picking out memories, slights, landmarks / which may not exist at all . . .” and so on. You feel that the poem is built as though it were a compressed version of the sonnets which occur throughout Misplaced Heart. The second of these poems, “Pickpocket”, is about how the mind plays tricks in terms of our experience of time and change, allowing one state to overlap another. Memory, it says memorably,

                                  contrives
to catch us off-guard, pick time past
from our empty pockets or put it back again.
Nothing mysterious here, other than a dawning realisation:

that the obvious can still surprise is, in itself, a surprise.

Another poem, “Joe Palooka”, focusses on memories, also, describing the way images of the past, of childhood, recur unpredictably:

 . . . . .
The past comes back stuttering, backlit
and un-sequenced like slides rattling and sticking
in an old-fashioned carousel:

A scene with a dog you can’t recall, children in cashmere,
three-quarter pose, awkward in a photographer’s studio,
a paddling pool made of canvas . . .

One thinks of the description of school life that the second of the poems in the original “Self Portrait” sequence falls into when it looks as though the poem is going to be about language.

Sea Scale collects the work of a major poet. It’s outlook – “demotic/philosophical” as I’ve described it earlier – seems to derive from its location. It’s a Sydney book in ways which it would be difficult to be too satisfactorily specific about – after all, all of Australia’s major cities are on the sea, inhabiting the symbolically potent landscape between rock and wave. But it does seem work which echoes, though it is very different, the poetry of Bruce Beaver, another poet of sea and shoreline. But, as I’ve said, rereading these, essentially twenty-first century poems (Emery’s first book was published in 2000), I’m struck be the tensions between the accurate delineation of process – especially the processes of the mind – and the desire to make aesthetically satisfying, even beautiful (a word that many of Emery’s poems worry at) structures. “Is this shape without pattern”, asks one of the new poems, making an important distinction but leaving it, as so often in Emery, an open question. Finally one might focus not so much on the tension between process and form as between experiencing and writing. Writing is imposing a kind of shape, even if no more than the shape of an interrogative clause, but the writing act, as Emery has said somewhere, involves a lot of fiddling, playing and exploring. It is not a logical controlling of meaningless flux. Typically, one of these poems brings the act of writing and thinking about writing into the texture of the poem itself. After making an analogy (very relevant in terms of form imposed on process) with the Second Law of Thermodynamics, a law which, narrowly interpreted, would require process to triumph over form, Emery stops himself:

     That’s going too far:

stretching a milestone moment in physics and turning it into
      a cheap poetic trick.

Brook Emery: Collusion

Posted on by Martin Duwell

St Kilda: John Leonard Press, 2012, 58pp.

Brook Emery’s previous book, the excellent Uncommon Light, explored with great subtlety and precision questions which are usually considered to be the provenance of philosophers of the mind: What is consciousness? How does it relate to the body? What is memory? And a host of other implicated issues: What is thought and how does it relate to meaning? It considered these by bringing to them a poet’s skill, an ability to speak about difficult-to-describe states in a tactile way (while always being aware of the paradoxes of “poetic” methods such as metaphor). The essential movement of the poetry is to undermine whatever solutions or certainties emerge as a result of meditation and when one thinks of Emery’s poetry and the way it is almost always “grounded” at the sea’s edge on the west coast of Australia, it is hard not to think in terms of the way sand shifts continuously beneath our feet, seeming to be both supporting and unstable. This position seems, at first, quite conventional for our time in that it rejects any transcendental ground of being and is highly sensitive to observed processes and interactions but I think it also rejects the Buddhism that might offer it a comfortable home since the virtues of those beliefs and practices are, after all, tied to a baroque theology involving vast imagined cycles of history and processes of rebirth. “That Beat Against the Cage” is a multipart poem from Uncommon Light that hammers away at such issues and its final stanza concludes on a note of dissatisfaction:

It’s untenable, this drifting that sees the world as drift.
The fantasy should ebb, become the half-recalled
calling of the sea, or else lifetimes will be spent meandering
self-consciously through the matter of the day,
shuttling back and forth as if transience
could be a domicile, fearful that to stray too far,
stay too long, is to change the story
for an understory, the agreed accepted world
for a thesis of perplexity: a conclusion there is 
no evidence to decide, or that the evidence
leads to thoughts the thought cannot sustain.

I’ve read this as a rejection of Buddhism but it might also be simply a rejection of a poetically convenient way of living in a liminal state, exploiting borders and uncertainties and using uncertainty as a stable ground on which to erect poetic structures full of the gestures that arise from certainty. At any rate, the poem seems to be saying that although uncertainty is a state, it isn’t one to feel comfortable about: transience can’t be a domicile.

But the book isn’t entirely about such matters: woven throughout Uncommon Light were a group of poems addressing a question that usually derives from the philosophical vectors of ethics and religion rather than from those of the nature of consciousness: what is the nature of evil and whence does it come? They weren’t the best poems in the book but their attempts to deal with the issue – significantly they were strongest when they dealt with the poet’s inability to deal with the issue! – were a welcome widening of perspective. This direction isn’t continued in Emery’s new book Collusion, but if it seems to abandon the question of evil it does have some poems about personal guilt.

Above all things, one’s first sense of Collusion is how organised a book it is, how little like a conventional collection of poems. If it keeps a narrower focus than Uncommon Light, it also experiments with a variety of tones, even of types of poems, and places them carefully. The first, last and central poems (they are all untitled) are done in epistolary style, addressed to K. At the moment we think of Kafka and start to explore the possibilities involved in writing to such a figure (or perhaps his protagonist), the middle poem carefully corrects our course:

. . . . . 
Dear K, I tire of the apparatus of my brain.
I fear that you (my interlocutor, my will,
my conscience) may also tire. The thoughts I think
have passed their use-by dates, are petals tossed
in Burnt Norton’s dusty wind. We could,
we probably do, lead many lives even as
an inoffensive clerk or as a monstrous insect
squirming on its back, feet and feelers wildly
seeking purchase on the air. We stand accused.
We answer allegations we make against ourselves.
                                        *
Someone finding this will think I’m corresponding
with Franz Kafka (it could be Kierkegaard
or Krazy Kat). I’m not that mad, and besides,
Kafka had too many problems of his own (migraines, boils,
constipation, tuberculosis, a certain paranoia). . . .

Although this invokes Eliot (twice) as well as Kafka, a book containing poems as imaginary letters, or letters to imaginary recipients (“corresponding” is an interesting pun) recalls the work of Bruce Beaver, especially his Letters to Live Poets, and reminds one that that poet, too, was an inhabitant of a Sydney beach surrounded by an environment which both thrust particulars at you while at the same time reminding you of their essential instability all in a sharp, crystal clear light. I can’t remember any earlier poems by Emery which are homages to Beaver but one of the groups of poems which are carefully interspersed throughout Collusion are clearly done in one of Beaver’s styles, probably that of the “Days” sequence of Odes and Days, the third of Beaver’s great central triptych of books. I’ll quote the first of them in full (it’s the fifth poem of Collusion):

It’s almost spring in our neglected hemisphere.
As yet no indication we’ve tilted far enough
to receive the annual, waited-for reward.
The sea and sky volley what there is of dusk
and a peevish wind plays nip and tuck
to irritate the waves. In its own good time
the sun will be here and the sea all aquamarine
as if, overnight, spirit could manifest as light
and just this startling colour. Then morning warmth,
leaves on imported trees, poems (God help us!),
and mothballs for our heavy winter clothes.
And are we lighter too. Do we deserve it?
No. But the punishing and forgiving world
will give it to us anyway and I’ll give thanks
though to whom or what it’s useless to inquire.

This is such a good approximation of a Beaver poem that it could actually be one and if I had had my Beaver collections at hand while writing this I would have nervously checked through them to make sure that it isn’t a quotation, perhaps from a late book like The Long Game. At any rate it catches the Beaver tone perfectly with its sudden unusual perspective (“our neglected hemisphere”), its sense of the world as a place to be lamented and celebrated, its tremendous drive that spills across into (and weirdly animates) a bathetic conclusion. The only thing that doesn’t seem Beaverish is the pun on “lighter” in the twelfth line. There are another six poems in this mode. If I had to guess the impetus behind them I would say that they experiment with inhabiting Beaver’s approach to living in the world. They temporarily eschew the elegant and subtle exploration of mind, thought and the real (and the balanced states of their inter-relationship) which mark most of the Emery poems, for an attitude of sudden brusque involvement resulting in a short, sharp lyric poem but one in which wider perspectives are included, not in a solemn, gestural way (as though a profundity were being offered, gift-wrapped, to the reader) but in a casual, tossed-off one.

There is another group of poems spaced through the book which identify themselves not only in that they are all ten lines long but in that all begin with ellipsis points and an indented first line – a clear indication that these are to be read as snapshots of process, though they might also be rescued fragments of one single long poem. The first two are memorable for their presentation of differing but equally symbolic scenes. In the first the author and (presumably) partner are placed between “the receding arcs of sea and sky” in front and “the green and terrible forest” behind. The two exist, of course, on the liminal sand (described here, with a nice example of that distinctive kind of pun which I think is called paronomasia, as “the intervening sleight of sand”) but they aren’t static: “our feet / lifted and set down, lifted and set down . . .”. In the second poem, examples of hard-nosed industry “three men in hardhats / and orange coveralls” on a bridge (already established in the book’s first poem as being in opposition to the flowing element beneath) are contrasted with a mannequin “forty feet below in a pink gown / and imitation pearls”.

The other poems of Collusion continue to recall Beaver in that they seem to be diary-like meditations, occasioned by living in the world: “All morning it’s been difficult to settle, difficult to harness / energy or purpose for all the things / I have to do.” Their distinctive movement is to be strung between relentless denial and tentative affirmation. A couple of them describe dreams and three, late in the book, deal with memories. One of these latter is prompted by a bicycle ride (and contains the clause “We can’t go back” which is surely an allusion to Beaver’s novel) another by an old photo and the third by recurrent domestic guilts induced by the humming monotony of an aeroplane flight. Compared with the issue of the monstrous evils explored in Uncommon Light, these guilts seem very minor: burying a younger brother up to his neck in the back yard, losing him at the Show, having a near disaster with his children in the surf. As the poem’s last stanza says: “This light-weight guilt is carried on the wind, along with doubt, / longing, nothing more than dust, clouds, rain, squall after squall, / as if wind intended to drag the whole Antarctic north . . .” But despite visits to the worlds of dream and guilt, these poems seem, essentially metaphysical in their obsessions.

One late poem works hard to describe a state of what might be called “significance”, experienced physically:

I almost understand this resonance, this hum
or echo which I can only picture as a frequency,
oscillations expanding and diminishing
from a single source. And the sometime static
which crackles and interrupts, which implies
another source, another thought or possibility. . . .

There is a central statement, “It’s not persistent but too here and now / to be dismissed as fleeting”, and then life returns to the commonplace – a grandchild sleeps in the back of the car and the poet reads Mark Strand. Fittingly, exactly as many stanzas are devoted to the everyday as to the definition of the barely describable state.

And this state, or something like it, is familiar from many of Emery’s poems. In one of them it appears at dawn in hypnagogic and liminal guise and demands consideration despite the cruder intrusion of early-morning sexual desire: “No. Not here. Not now. There’s so much to consider. The sequence of sounds, the unknowable and what it means, the time it takes // to cross an interval between two spots or states . . .” One of the best poems is an extended attempt at description culminating in metaphors deployed as expression of both difference and similarity:

. . . . . 
                                        My mind is silent too
and still. I can’t describe it. Not empty
like some vessel, not grey and wispy
like a fog: something more substantial,
not set and settled but curiously serene,
like breathing starlight . . .

Perhaps, ultimately, a metaphor like this final one is the most powerfully descriptive mode though it is hedged about with problems.

Above all, throughout Emery’s poetry and repeatedly here in Collusion, there is a refusal to locate in this state some kind of transcendental ground. There is also a refusal of the next level of stasis whereby the refusal to accept a transcendental ground becomes a ground in itself. There isn’t any celebration of uncertainty here, more a process of living attuned to what is happening as one’s mind engages the manifold dimensions of reality. As the first poem in the book says:

. . . . .
                                        The glimmerings are flecks of time.
          I can’t decide whether they are truly in the moment or
          moments out of time, essence or deviation from the path.
There’s no conclusion here, no resolution myth. Things rise up
          and fall away as if they never were, rise up again. I like the
          dancing light,
the scattered cloud, the river that lies potentially between its banks,
          the speeding train. I reach for them. They reach for me.

Brook Emery: Uncommon Light

Posted on by Martin Duwell

Carlton: Five Islands Press, 2007, 72pp.

This is Brook Emery’s third book. The first two – and dug my fingers in the sand (2000) and Misplaced Heart (2003) – share what are, essentially, philosophico -poetic concerns. Emery is especially good, in these, at registering the sense of an observing self, simultaneously part of the normal processes of the world and apart from them. As the first poem of his first book – significantly about the sea – says:

I'm in the sea but not of it, neither fish
nor fisherman nor sailor with their understanding
of its distance and its depths . . . . .

He is also good at epistemological issues, such as the fact that, when part of the world momentarily makes some sense (“coheres” is the word he is inclined to use) we are uncertain as to whether that is a pattern we impose or whether we have uncovered an underlying law. Does knowing less make patterns easier to discern? That is, is there a tension between empirical data and generalisation? He is continuously intrigued by the status of thought and the fact that thoughts arise naturally in us and play over experiences. He is also highly sensitive to the way in which the future passes through the present and on into the past and the fact that these three time-states are decidedly different. The present is the world of immersion while the past – full of traces of the present – is a remembered and analysed construct.

This all might make Emery seem like a second-rate philosopher but the fact is that he is a first-rate poet. He manages to convince us that these are not only intellectual issues but intensely internalised ones, part of his visceral experience of the world. This is done by the deployment of a small but potent cast of symbols. Of these water – as the sea and as rain – is the most common. Yes, the sea seems to represent the incomprehensible world of the data of experience – swimming is never a simple act in Emery – but it is also part of a personal environment. Emery, like Slessor , is profoundly a Sydney poet. Many poems are set inside a car (often during a rainstorm) and the situation is exploited as a way of coming to terms with the artist’s sense of being simultaneously inside and outside the world. After the rain, so to speak, come the birds, often exploited as symbols of thought.

Uncommon Light builds on and extends these first books – a critical commonplace – but it also makes radical changes. It begins with a poem, “Very Like a Whale” which is, as its title suggests about imposed perception. This seems contiguous with the earlier books, but there are two elements here that I think are rarer than in the first two books and which are very important in this new one. One is an emphasis on the self:

. . . . .
        I am not what I imagined,
                       here I am the illusionist
                       and dupe of my illusions,
        making the angels disappear, wishing them back again.
. . . . .

And the second, only suggested here in the word “angels”, an interest in the possibility of transcendence of some kind. Later in the poem, the self is redescribed in an entirely materialist, evolutionary way as:

               one more clay figurine with beseeching hollows
                                           where the eyes should be,
                                           as different from the others
 as I am the same, no more evolved
                                           than a roach,
                                           no better than a rat,
                                           happy as a labrador in the sun.
                  This is grace, the rest is commentary
                  and I would let it go: in millennia

 I'll chatter metaphysics with a chimpanzee, now
                            my thoughts are the antlers of the Irish elk,
                                                     the wings of flightless birds . . . . .

Of course a word like “grace” leaps out at the reader in a passage such as this. To complicate matters, it is not easy to be entirely sure about its significance here. It could be saying that grace is the state of living entirely physically, at one with the natural and animal world. It could also be saying, of course, that “grace” is a theological nonsense, a sense of bodily rightness that has become encrusted with commentary.

So Uncommon Light extends the generally epistemological concerns of the first two books into questions of our material identity and the validity of the idea of transcendence. It is also obsessed (I don’t think it too strong a word) with the idea of evil. This is a theme sounded in a number of poems towards the end of Misplaced Heart . Poems like “Self-portrait with Exploding Device”, “Aubade and Evensong: New Year, 2003” and “Commentary: Two Days”, though corralled in a single section of the book, all address the idea of suffering in the contemporary world. This note is continued almost immediately in Uncommon Light . The second poem, “Spring”, recalls the book’s epigraph from Orwell:

. . . spring is still spring. The atom bombs are piling up in the  factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are  streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going around the  sun and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they  disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it.

“Spring” uses, as its central metaphor, the idea that we absorb time as sunlight and eventually let it show as cancers – “Our darker selves in and out of seasons”. And this bleak note is taken up in “Finches Perhaps” which deals first with the response of our thoughts when faced with a site of horror such as the Khmer Rouge torture centre of Tuol Sleng and then with the “tyrants” themselves:

Birds strip the hanging air, cut through it
between bars, through chinks, always at this

flit-flitting peak, this in and away as we say,
monstrous; as we say, how could anyone

have endured; thinking they, thinking if I were,
as birds dart in micro-moments through

our scant attention to how time corrodes
between denials then and now. It happened

and happened, normal really how helpless
rectify appears. Mind that thinks manacle

and bird and time cants to be a shrug. Tomorrow
the new tyrant's found in a spider hole, he has

a thick white web of beard, he has a gun
he doesn't fire. A torch shines in his open mouth,

the talk again of supervised elections. Distinctions
are this stark: Tuol Sleng – the poisoned mound -

used to be a school; its commandant
taught mathematics; its guards were adolescent.

Coherence only in the birds, what they have reclaimed.

It is a potent poem and, as far as I can see, gets double value out of the birds flitting in and out of the prison windows. They symbolise our thoughts – and thus connect the poem up to its author’s epistemological concerns – but they also symbolise a natural world that is, by definition, coherent.

The issue of the nature of evil gets a thorough working over in a four part poem called “Monster” whose parts are spread throughout the book. This poem impresses in the way it operates by statement and denial. Emery often puts both sides of a situation and lets the statements lie alongside each other – working by balancing possibilities rather than a potentially reductive assertion. The first “Monster” poem asserts unequivocally that the monster is present with us in the womb. Monstrosity is not a perversion or a freak sport of nature but an inherently human condition – we are all capable of running Auschwitz or Tuol Sleng . The second poem worries about the essentialism of this position: no monster, after all, produced the Lisbon earthquake – that is a product of some random and completely natural processes. It experiments with the idea of lived experience being made up of encounters between the good and the bad, the monsters and the saints:

. . . . .
I know saintliness exists. It's all around me.
My next door neighbours in their simple modesty,
the lady down the street who is always

helping someone older than herself. Even the slow
judicial process conceives it natural to be better
than we are. I'm trying to shoo the gloomy birds away

but crows repeat about me on the lawn; and the vulture
and the kite, the cuckoo and the owl: should I have given up the ghost 
when I was drawn from the womb?

The third and fourth “Monster” poems censor the first two by overlaying an epistemological rigorousness:

. . . . .
                                            I'm embarrassed

by the flimsiness of my resolve, the silliness of saints and monsters,
conversations with a being who can't plausibly exist,
this mockery of flagellation . . . . .

and a return to issues of coherence: are observations of order “true but trivial” or a window into profound underlying laws? At any rate, the final result is bleak:

Against the livid orange sunset, consolation
(Is it a wing? A fuselage?) dips behind the hill,
out of the debris: fragments, disconnected things,
suffering that makes nothing holy.

Others have noted that Emery is a master of extended – usually multi-part – poetic meditations. At the core of Uncommon Light are a number of these. They make a very impressive achievement. The first of them is “That Beat Against the Cage” another poem to work over the bird/thought connection. The essential question that it asks is: where is life primary and where is it secondary? Its eight poems come down against the idea (shared by Buddhists and twentieth century metaphysicians) that life is an observed process and that what matters is not essences but field and flow:

. . . . .
Life lopes away as we dally in sub-plot, or worse
in a stream of consciousness; these thoughts,
sometimes like chirping birds, more often
like the incidental murmur of the sea, or wind
that gusts down evening streets. They never stop.

And yet, despite this confident rejection, there is still an intellectual openness: “I think it is. I think it isn’t”:

Yet there is confinement when all is in its place ,
the mind becomes eye's slave, scribe of boundaries,
reporter of coherence.
. . . . .

What complicates – or adds a third perspective – is a sense of a kind of non-transcendent transcendence which can be found in many places in this book, not least in its title – a quotation, we are told, from Augustine speaking of God’s view from an omniscient perspective. Some of the best poetry in Uncommon Light is that describing this sense that “The world holds back / a secret for itself, puts up a lattice work / of truth and lies.” Ideas are difficult to do in poetry but an almost queasy sensation is something even more challenging. One of the poems from “That Beat Against the Cage” makes an impressive attempt to speak of a transcendence that can be sensed but not really argued for:

I would see the outline of the world sufficient
had there not been an unconcealment ,
as though the wind were taking off its clothes,
a folding and unfolding of bird and tree and light
all the time back to swirling fire, emergent seas.

It's as if I'm deep inside the world, gripped
and almost capable of understanding
the mystery that is no mystery, that yields
but in yielding withdraws behind the clouds.

This seems an alias of beautiful, an inkling
that is in the moment but escapes the present.
Nothing here's sublime, nothing fixed and final ,
nothing artful: this records confusion and the mind's existence.

I know that many will find this kind of meditative beating out of ideas and positions unattractive, but I am greatly taken by this poem and the way it tries in words to get towards the edges of a profound but non-religious experience – a profound philosophical sensation. “That Beats Against the Cage” finishes with an unequivocal rejection of that version of the-world-as-process which leads to an idea of art as the solipsistic recording of the transient:

It's untenable, this drifting that sees the world as drift.
The fantasy should ebb, become the half-recalled
calling of the sea, or else lifetimes will be spent meandering
self-consciously through the matter of the day,
shuttling back and forth as if transience
could be a domicile . . . . .

Other poems record this sensation of approaching a transcendent which is not located above or even, really, within: it is more that it is underlying. “Nevertheless Also There” is an example. Beginning “The ordinary, it seems, is something more”, it goes on to describe the bodily sensation of seeming removed:

                       a kind of separation where my body
was an empty overcoat given form by air
and the something that was absent, too physical
to be a thought, too stark and inessential
to be a soul, was also there without a shade
or outline though it looked to float above me
and to occupy an equal space. This division
outlasts the waking moment so a day or life
or lives are spent in mist and expectation
or the purblind clarity left by rain when the everyday
is edged and charged and hardly changed at all.

And “Making a Presence” takes up the same theme, speaking of the unseen which makes

                 a presence here, a passing that takes us
even as we hold together harder. Hours blow by
and the stranger remains, making fans of trees ,
sharpening the sand, whispering and hissing till we
hear the vacancy it sings, this way, this way, it lies.
Wind whistles beyond us and my voice is the sea
torn to snow, cattle beneath a hill, an empty room ,
something promised and just beyond my reach.

Finally there is the title poem itself. Thirty-eight one line statements, questions and imperatives. Like another poem, “Tourism: What the I Sees”, “Uncommon Light” is an attempt to move into a poetic mode quite different to the usual meditations of Emery’s work. It is about the eye and its responses to what it sees. One line “An edge we share: it makes conspirators of us all” is about the involvement of subject with object while another “Starlight becomes us: no, really; divinity adapts as it descends” while looking neoplatonic is probably a statement of human- centredness so that all things become human size when we process them. That would make it the inverse of Blake’s “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite”. Finally there is the mysterious question “Common and uncommon light: who patrols the border?” which could be interpreted in many ways including as a rhetorical question. The significance of “Uncommon Light” though, is not so much what its gnomic sentences add to the complicated concerns of the book but rather in its move to a different mode. Of course this Delphic mode is not necessarily more intensely “poetic”. Philosophers from Heracleitus to Nietzsche and Wittgenstein have enjoyed the way cryptic propositions engage with discursive thought.

Looking at Emery’s work so far we can see a clear pattern of movement from a poetry almost entirely concerned with issues of reality, essence and knowledge to a poetry that almost is forced to face some of the mass horrors of the world. In Uncommon Light it tries to find ways of doing this that do not sacrifice the epistemological rigour of the earlier work. At the same time it quietly, and often in the interstices, asks painful questions about the value of poetry. The prospects – for the world, for knowledge and for poetry – might said to be bleak but bracing.