Brook Emery

Everyone seems to be writing about ‘light’ at the moment. It is currently an all-purpose metaphor, the intangible symbol for all intangibles: mental, physical and emotional. With Brook Emery, it is far more precise. The ‘Uncommon Light’ of Emery’s title poem comes from St Augustine, and ideas of ‘common’ and ‘uncommon’ light recur throughout the poems, but are re-defined, flipped, turned and re-examined throughout this thoughtful and sustained book.

From Masefield to Beaver, the anapaestic metre of a double unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one is often used in poems about the sea. It reproduces the rhythm of waves and also suggests a reflective but eager mood. Brook Emery’s strongly crafted collection is often based in anapaestic metre (‘a pelican, flying a loose ellipse / … sets his head / and great hooked wings lift him into sleepy light’) which tightens into iambic (single down stress plus up stress) when he wishes for a feeling of conclusion. One would not normally begin a review by discussing metre, but in this case I felt the metre was intrinsic to the authorial tone and perhaps reveals why the work’s effect is of much memorable insight, beauty, and precision in conflict with strategic monotony.