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'The phrase ‘have been and are’ is taken from the last sentence of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species – ‘Endless forms most beautiful and wonderful have been and are being evolved’ – and the poems in Brook Emery’s fifth collection are attentive to the implied puzzles of evolution and beauty, fixity and flux. Imagined as ‘transactions’ between readers and writers across time the loosely-linked poems, all of whose titles bar one are quotations, tangle and untangle the interlacings of nature, language, culture and identity in an attempt to discover ‘ground on which to stand’.
'Full of allusions, sometimes personal, sometimes bemused, often reflective and speculative, the poetry is consistently lucid, lyrical and tactile; it thinks through the eye, the ear, the body’s engagement with the world:
'‘… So, I pass through bush, I tread upon;
'I am within the sea, wrapped round, held … ’'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Works about this Work
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Jenny Henty Reviews Have Been and Are by Brook Emery
2017
single work
review
— Appears in: Plumwood Mountain [Online] , October 2017;
— Review of Have Been and Are 2016 selected work poetry -
Review Short: Brook Emery’s Have Been and Are
2017
single work
essay
— Appears in: Cordite Poetry Review , 1 May vol. 80 no. 2017;'Brook Emery’s new collection, Have Been and Are, continues in the vein of what might be called philosophical-demotic established in previous volumes such as Uncommon Light and Collusion. I don’t think that anyone else in the cohort of contemporary Australian poetry does this quite as well as he does. One might look to a poet of the recent past like Bruce Beaver as a model (or rival) for these sophisticated but always humble meditations, and there are occasions when Emery sounds very like Beaver, but Beaver’s poetry has a suppressed and often irrational anger not far below the surface, something that I cannot detect at all in Emery’s poems. And then, moving back, there is John Blight, whose sea sonnets – though hardly poems of process – often bump up against similar questions. And Blight was an early admirer of Beaver, and one of his poems was called (quoting a critic) ‘His Best Poems Are About the Sea’ which reminds us that one of the poems in Have Been and Are says, ‘I’m always writing about the sea, about change, / about power …’, so perhaps there is a small local tradition here.' (Introduction)
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Luke Fischer’s Launch of Have Been and Are by Brook Emery
2017
single work
essay
— Appears in: Mascara Literary Review , April no. 20 2017; 'Welcome everyone. For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Luke Fischer. I’m a poet and philosopher, and this afternoon I have the great pleasure and honour of launching Brook Emery’s splendid new book of poems, his fifth collection have been and are, published by the new Melbourne press Gloria SMH. Jacinta Le Plastrier, whom many of you would also know as the current director of Australian Poetry and who formerly worked at John Leonard Press, is the publisher and co-founder of Gloria SMH. At the outset I’d like to congratulate Jacinta and her colleagues on the beautiful production and design of this book.' (Introduction)
-
Jenny Henty Reviews Have Been and Are by Brook Emery
2017
single work
review
— Appears in: Plumwood Mountain [Online] , October 2017;
— Review of Have Been and Are 2016 selected work poetry -
Luke Fischer’s Launch of Have Been and Are by Brook Emery
2017
single work
essay
— Appears in: Mascara Literary Review , April no. 20 2017; 'Welcome everyone. For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Luke Fischer. I’m a poet and philosopher, and this afternoon I have the great pleasure and honour of launching Brook Emery’s splendid new book of poems, his fifth collection have been and are, published by the new Melbourne press Gloria SMH. Jacinta Le Plastrier, whom many of you would also know as the current director of Australian Poetry and who formerly worked at John Leonard Press, is the publisher and co-founder of Gloria SMH. At the outset I’d like to congratulate Jacinta and her colleagues on the beautiful production and design of this book.' (Introduction) -
Review Short: Brook Emery’s Have Been and Are
2017
single work
essay
— Appears in: Cordite Poetry Review , 1 May vol. 80 no. 2017;'Brook Emery’s new collection, Have Been and Are, continues in the vein of what might be called philosophical-demotic established in previous volumes such as Uncommon Light and Collusion. I don’t think that anyone else in the cohort of contemporary Australian poetry does this quite as well as he does. One might look to a poet of the recent past like Bruce Beaver as a model (or rival) for these sophisticated but always humble meditations, and there are occasions when Emery sounds very like Beaver, but Beaver’s poetry has a suppressed and often irrational anger not far below the surface, something that I cannot detect at all in Emery’s poems. And then, moving back, there is John Blight, whose sea sonnets – though hardly poems of process – often bump up against similar questions. And Blight was an early admirer of Beaver, and one of his poems was called (quoting a critic) ‘His Best Poems Are About the Sea’ which reminds us that one of the poems in Have Been and Are says, ‘I’m always writing about the sea, about change, / about power …’, so perhaps there is a small local tradition here.' (Introduction)
