'Brook Emery's mode is enquiry, with a gentle insistence that enquiry matters. Fluent, occasionally epigrammatic, and showing a quiet humour, this is generous, open-minded poetry. As in previous collections, Emery's interest is in the intersections of the material, the spiritual and the rational. The poems are loosely addressed as letters to some implied correspondent, who might be real, the self or unconscious.
While Collusion is metaphysical in intent, the poems keep up a habit of sharp and tactile observation – the abstract becomes sensuous, and the intellectual makes friends with the physical. Swinging between affirmation and uncertainty, they weigh up the beauty and losses of the natural and human worlds.' (Publication summary)
'T he act of reading for appraisal rather than pleasure is a privilege that brings me to a deepened understanding of the contemporary in Australian poetry, the way the past is being framed, its traditions, celebrities and enigmas washed up in new and hybrid appearances or redressed in more conventional, sometimes nimbus forms. Judith Wright wrote that the ‘place to find clues is not in the present, it lies in the past: a shallow past, as all immigrants to Australia know, and all of us are immigrants.’ The discipline of reading to filter such a range of voices underlines my foreignness, making reading akin to translation, whilst reciprocally inviting the reader of this essay to become a foreigner to my assumptions and conclusions.' (Introduction)
'T he act of reading for appraisal rather than pleasure is a privilege that brings me to a deepened understanding of the contemporary in Australian poetry, the way the past is being framed, its traditions, celebrities and enigmas washed up in new and hybrid appearances or redressed in more conventional, sometimes nimbus forms. Judith Wright wrote that the ‘place to find clues is not in the present, it lies in the past: a shallow past, as all immigrants to Australia know, and all of us are immigrants.’ The discipline of reading to filter such a range of voices underlines my foreignness, making reading akin to translation, whilst reciprocally inviting the reader of this essay to become a foreigner to my assumptions and conclusions.' (Introduction)
