Review by Martyn Crucefix of "Modern Fog" by Chris Emery

Chris Emery’s new collection presents, and intends to see beyond, the Modern Fog of its title. Here are walking poems, encounters with creatures, and images of modern life’s scruffy ‘dreck.’ ‘The Bay’ can be read as a condensed version of Larkin’s ‘Here,’ the walker arriving at a bay, dotted with ruined buildings. This image of transience, in effect a memento mori, is softened a little with Emery’s insistence that the homesteads ‘still hold their ounce of love.’ 

In ‘Day Fox,’ the animal’s ‘living amber’ is seen against the green of grass, but its later death is also clear: ‘his pelt was tar black and slicked back.’ Emery goes beyond the fact of death as, in the corpse’s wasting away, ‘the world / relaxed into him with all its fiery prayers.’ To declare this an image of an afterlife is to lack subtlety, yet Emery is surely probing Eliot’s idea that ‘In order to arrive at what you are not / You must go through the way in which you are not’ (‘East Coker’). 

Emery’s images of our modern world – like an NCP car park, the final destination perhaps of the couple in ‘Newbies’ driving along ‘old roads, lobbed estates’ – function as foils to the ‘churchgoing’ side of his work. ‘The Wall Paintings’ – a visit to St. Andrew’s, Wickhampton – opens not with cycle clips, but with the equally evocative ‘thunk of a latch and then your eyes adjust.’ 

The final poem, ‘The Legacy,’ records the removal of an empty wasps’ nest. In the transformative effect of genuine poetry, the nest becomes a human life, ‘gorgeously dented,’ from which the creatures that made it have departed ‘to drone in apple acres / elsewhere darkening / with sweet ruin now.’ Whether we believe in such a place is, with writing as good as this, hardly the point, appealing as it does, through powerful imagery to a human longing for continuation in the face of what we think we know of death. 

About the reviewer
Martyn Crucefix's Between a Drowning Man is published by Salt in 2023; his translations of Peter Huchel (Shearsman) won the 2020 Schlegel-Tieck Prize. A Rilke Selected Poems, Change Your Life, is due from Pushkin Press, Spring 2024. You can find his blog here.  

You can read more about Modern Fog by Chris Emery on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

Review by Kathleen Bell of "Travellers" by Michelene Wandor

Travellers by Michelene Wandor is a thin book with great depth. The eleven poems within repay many re-readings. They suit this time. When we’re urged by politicians and the media to take single, simple views about almost everything, these poems offer complexity and multiple perspectives. Even 'Beached,' at two pages the shortest poem in the book, keeps shifting viewpoint ranging from the texture of cowrie shells 'fine ridged, oval' to the surfer 'haloed spiderman red / by the sinking sun' and the 'crow-black verger' sweeping sand from the cathedral nave.

Other poems are more complex still. 'The Clock of Heaven: a Fugue' begins with a Marc Chagall painting but reaches back through time to John Harrison, inventor of the marine chronometer. It travels across seas too, taking us on a voyage where 'winds whistle and sing,' listing luxuries associated with colonialism and plunder – 'cloves gold silver pearls / diamonds calico ebony,' pausing to hear Harrison play the viola da gamba, before whirling out into the expanse of space where 'the earth is a cog in the clockwork universe.'

Shifts of power play out in the Biblical story and handed-down tales of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. Even in the opening sensual encounter there are warnings of a future in which 'women’s voices and / instruments will be banned' – a prohibition later lifted. In the final section a family of Ethiopian Jews, now outlawed, encounter the poet in Regent’s Park where 'isn’t it strange' one woman says to her, 'how we live / such different lives.'

'Travellers' and 'Two Men' explore, obliquely, hundred-year-old roots of today’s Middle East conflicts. The 'Travellers,' Gertrude Bell and T. E. Lawrence, meet in the desert. Both have found happier selves in Arabia: 'he has quitted his English self / in England she is just a woman, an empty jar / here she is in linen and khaki.' But for all this, their first loyalty lies with their own government. 'The British will break their promises' the poem’s commentary reminds us. 'They have sold the same camel twice.' The 'Two Men' are Khalil al-Sakakini and Alter Levine, both poets, imprisoned together in 1917 because 'the word "guest" is sacred from Jordan to Euphrates.' There is some common ground but also crucially different hopes for a future in the same land. Finally free, 'they take down the tent and depart.'

About the reviewer
Kathleen Bell's new poetry pamphlet Do You Know How Kind I Am? will be published shortly by Leafe Press. A book-length collection, Disappearances, is scheduled for publication by Shoestring in the autumn. Until last year Kathleen taught Creative Writing at De Montfort University. She lives in the East Midlands.

You can read more about Travellers by Michelene Wandor, and an extract from it, on Creative Writing at Leicester here.