'The phrase ‘have been and are’ is taken from the last sentence of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species – ‘Endless forms most beautiful and wonderful have been and are being evolved’ – and the poems in Brook Emery’s fifth collection are attentive to the implied puzzles of evolution and beauty, fixity and flux. Imagined as ‘transactions’ between readers and writers across time the loosely-linked poems, all of whose titles bar one are quotations, tangle and untangle the interlacings of nature, language, culture and identity in an attempt to discover ‘ground on which to stand’.
'Full of allusions, sometimes personal, sometimes bemused, often reflective and speculative, the poetry is consistently lucid, lyrical and tactile; it thinks through the eye, the ear, the body’s engagement with the world:
'‘… So, I pass through bush, I tread upon;
'I am within the sea, wrapped round, held … ’'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
'Brook Emery’s new collection, Have Been and Are, continues in the vein of what might be called philosophical-demotic established in previous volumes such as Uncommon Light and Collusion. I don’t think that anyone else in the cohort of contemporary Australian poetry does this quite as well as he does. One might look to a poet of the recent past like Bruce Beaver as a model (or rival) for these sophisticated but always humble meditations, and there are occasions when Emery sounds very like Beaver, but Beaver’s poetry has a suppressed and often irrational anger not far below the surface, something that I cannot detect at all in Emery’s poems. And then, moving back, there is John Blight, whose sea sonnets – though hardly poems of process – often bump up against similar questions. And Blight was an early admirer of Beaver, and one of his poems was called (quoting a critic) ‘His Best Poems Are About the Sea’ which reminds us that one of the poems in Have Been and Are says, ‘I’m always writing about the sea, about change, / about power …’, so perhaps there is a small local tradition here.' (Introduction)
'Brook Emery’s new collection, Have Been and Are, continues in the vein of what might be called philosophical-demotic established in previous volumes such as Uncommon Light and Collusion. I don’t think that anyone else in the cohort of contemporary Australian poetry does this quite as well as he does. One might look to a poet of the recent past like Bruce Beaver as a model (or rival) for these sophisticated but always humble meditations, and there are occasions when Emery sounds very like Beaver, but Beaver’s poetry has a suppressed and often irrational anger not far below the surface, something that I cannot detect at all in Emery’s poems. And then, moving back, there is John Blight, whose sea sonnets – though hardly poems of process – often bump up against similar questions. And Blight was an early admirer of Beaver, and one of his poems was called (quoting a critic) ‘His Best Poems Are About the Sea’ which reminds us that one of the poems in Have Been and Are says, ‘I’m always writing about the sea, about change, / about power …’, so perhaps there is a small local tradition here.' (Introduction)
