"Modern fog" by Chris Emery (Arc, 2024)

Poems from Ambit, Bad Lilies, London Magazine, PN Review, etc.

Here's the start and end of "The Path" -

• All the no-shows picking their way/ through whin and leaf mould along the path,/ with England's wild attendance/ flinging or fleeing, will not remind.
• I have led you here through all possible music/ for something we cannot wholly know/ and you will pull up my hand and kiss it/ and carefully we walk on.

I don't understand all the first sentence - why "no-shows"? The final sentence's sentiment is repeated later. There are journeys, guides and things just beyond our understanding - "something lost" (p.14); "All that remains is absence" (p.12); "the dogs/ are astounded at the edge of what's never/ fully grasped" (p.12). Elsewhere the persona aims "to solemnise the marginal and lost" (p.61)

There's detail - universes in grains of sand. There are mere symbols (faded memories, souvenirs) of something that used to mean so much. I'm rather allergic to writing that's about things just beyond our understanding. Meditations aren't my thing either - which is maybe why "At St Helen's Ranworth" (a 12 part, 12 page piece) didn't grab me.

There are animals (dogs, marsh harriers, hare, fox, seal, etc) - observation, followed by a dream or their death. "Hares" is the easiest of these pieces.

Sometimes it's as if he feels the need to insert adjectives, so he scatters some in, hopefully. They work in "The lane tipped out beside dumped farm metal/ and plucked fields" (p.61) ("metal" is preferable to the more obvious "machinery". I've seen "plucked fields" before, but it's ok). I like "puffed vintage cloud" (p.47). In "we're out/ in cream air, old roads, lobbed estates seeping/ by the rim of each roundabout -/ the weedy local bypass, a single show house empty" (p.63) I like "lobbed estates" but why "seeping"? Some other lines have the sheen of poetry but I'm not always convinced -

• The dreamy sky is yellow, then russet under/an octave of stars (p.27). Why "octave"?
• I ask you if you/ understand the marriage of things when it gets dark,// you say the world belongs to itself for sure (p.27). Maybe. Borderline.
• No one told him he could make his deep mother/ from apple pips and spider legs/ in the latrine (p.31). Eh?
• We're taking pets from town to town,/ driving through thunderstorms/ in a garbage countdown/ to the metal noon. (p.32). Eh?
• Dawn's unlost loves/ curtained in sweeping hail. The slowest east./ Everything counting and counted that shoves/ from grey acres into one venal feast (p.74). Eh?
• all that sweet showiness we go through while May dies/ and another season crams its heat/ into the centre of you, grown so tall,/ then suddenly it is over (p.72, "Cow parsley"). That works for me.
• The government of my hours knocked back,/ staring at each maquette fried stiff inside its clock of limbs,/ the easel flayed with time and yet our sun-bare god had turned/ to spread new lies into each other (p.59). Eh?
• the dream so hot/ we formed a simple absence of ourselves/ in the reckless afternoon (p.50). Maybe, but by p.50 readers are overdosed on absences.
• He was slowly withdrawing from us/ nothing to clear the debris of him, the world/ relaxed into him with all its fiery prayer (p.53). Borderline but no - too keen to get "prayer" in.

I like the idea of "The establishment of the scene" whose last line is "Our end is your beginning. Titles. Snow". Mostly the book's line endings don't matter much though p.54 and p.66 nearly have full end-rhymes.

Other reviews

• Martyn Crucefix (The poems revel in describing aspects of this world and ... the occasions for such descriptions arise from journeys (often walking – the cover shows a hand-holding rambling couple) and the highlights of such journeys are frequently encounters with creatures ... There is more than a little of Philip Larkin in Emery’s work ... {In] The remarkable poem ‘Stags’ ... the momentary sighting of the creatures is (in the poem itself) now no more than a shaky memory, an ‘absence’ that stands ‘at the edge of what’s never / fully grasped’. But the recall of their passing still has a potency as a ‘store of grace and loss’ and is here declared ‘the last religion of these woods’.)
• Jacke Law (While the intended meaning of certain poems remained at times opaque, the language employed proved rich and pleasurable to peruse and attempts to unpick.)
• Jonathan Evens (The new themes he found included writing about spirituality, something, he once thought he would never do, and mystery – “the mystery of place, the mystery of the Other, the mystery of ourselves” ... The Path’ seems to sum up most fully the journey he undertakes in this collection)