AustLit

'Sea Scale comprises thirty new poems and a generous selection from Brook Emery’s previous five volumes. From and dug my fingers in the sand, his first book, to Have Been and Are, his most recent, reviewers have noted the fluency and tactility of his writing and the range of his thinking and allusions. His poetry is speculative, always wondering, occasionally playful, always trying to make sense of the complexities of the material, spiritual and rational worlds. The inter-weavings of mind and brain, language and culture, nature and society, time and memory are all swept up in this enquiry. His particular skill is to render abstract and intellectual issues in sensuous and physical imagery. Ever-present is the sea which, while sometimes performing metaphoric or symbolic functions, is always its material self: ‘the glittering humpbacked sea, the thousand flickering things the mind lights on and tries to hold.’'  (Publication summary)

'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.