Collusion

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 the 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.

Brooke Emery

Brook Emery lives near the surf in Sydney, where he was born in 1949. He has published three books of poetry, and dug my fingers in the sand (FIP, 2000), which won the Judith Wright Calanthe Prize in the Queensland Premier’s Awards, Misplaced Heart (FIP, 2003) and Uncommon Light (FIP, 2007). All three were short-listed for the Kenneth Slessor Prize in the NSW Premier’s Awards. A former teacher, he directed the Australian Poetry Festival in 2008 and 2010 and was until recently Chairperson of the Poets Union.

Review

Brook Emery's Collusion manages to combine equanimity and equivocation. Even as he wrestles with profound and complex questions, Emery retains a core of serenity.

There are moments of deep contentment, "as though the sun had circled thus for us", the warm and hopeful presence of a grandchild, sleeping and stirring through storms meteorological and metaphysical, and there are the fears that the abject body cannot escape, though in this case of incapacity rather than death.

In one vivid image, a "jacaranda/ against the church's mortared, crumbling mass,/ mauve and stunning and substantial as it is -/ all indirect flowering of twists and turns", at first suggests there is solidity to be found in the natural world rather than the crumbling church, but this poet goes on to upset any such easy reading, noting that the tree "seems uncontained, as though at any moment/ it might escape the rooted, understandable restraints/ of space and time".

Emery describes the jacaranda in terms that reveal it as contingent and temporary as the ruined church. These are the poems of an unfaltering observer, filled with questions and meditations that ripple through the book as the poet works at unravelling arguments and lacing them together again.

Ultimately, in Collusion, only uncertainty is to be depended on.

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