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y separately published work icon Sea Scale : New and Selected Poems selected work   poetry  
Issue Details: First known date: 2022... 2022 Sea Scale : New and Selected Poems
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'Sea Scale comprises thirty new poems and a generous selection from Brook Emery’s previous five volumes. From and dug my fingers in the sand, his first book, to Have Been and Are, his most recent, reviewers have noted the fluency and tactility of his writing and the range of his thinking and allusions. His poetry is speculative, always wondering, occasionally playful, always trying to make sense of the complexities of the material, spiritual and rational worlds. The inter-weavings of mind and brain, language and culture, nature and society, time and memory are all swept up in this enquiry. His particular skill is to render abstract and intellectual issues in sensuous and physical imagery. Ever-present is the sea which, while sometimes performing metaphoric or symbolic functions, is always its material self: ‘the glittering humpbacked sea, the thousand flickering things the mind lights on and tries to hold.’'  (Publication summary)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

    • Glebe, Glebe - Leichhardt - Balmain area, Sydney Inner West, Sydney, New South Wales,: Puncher and Wattmann , 2022 .
      image of person or book cover 2065988673508726515.jpg
      Image courtesy of publisher's website.
      Extent: 292p.
      Note/s:
      •  Published: 10th March 2022
      ISBN: 9781922571090
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Works about this Work

Brook Emery: Sea Scale: New and Selected Poems Martin Duwell , 2022 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Poetry Review , no. 17 2022;
— Review of Sea Scale : New and Selected Poems Brook Emery , 2022 selected work poetry '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.'

 (Introduction)
Brook Emery: Sea Scale: New and Selected Poems Martin Duwell , 2022 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Poetry Review , no. 17 2022;
— Review of Sea Scale : New and Selected Poems Brook Emery , 2022 selected work poetry '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.'

 (Introduction)
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Last amended 17 Aug 2022 10:17:27
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