Wonder asks how we live with history, with absence, with longing — and how we keep returning to the difficult beauty of the world.
In his fifth collection of poems, Chris Emery explores the nature of wonder in its various forms of awe, reflection, and the marvellous. The poems range from the absurd, to the historical, the comic and fantastical – dropping us into stories and places we never quite expect.
The collection considers where and how we live: in the city, in the country, on the coast, or elsewhere – and the strange lives we endure in often disparate communities, connected to each other through history and nature, and sometimes separated by it.
As with Emery’s previous work, the poems reveal the intimate and fleeting in human experience, and can delve into the mundane, reverie or dreamscape, each lyric serving to illustrate the joy of common experience, all expressed in musical and arresting language that never avoids the freight of emotion.
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A fine collection. Smaller poems scattered throughout it such as ‘Truer’ and ‘How Small We Were’ reveal a genuine individual tone – mordant, searching, surprising the reader – and a poet capable of creating unpredictable, freshly-coined images that stay with one after the book has been put down. It takes guts to name a poetry collection Wonder, but Emery lives up to it in many of the poems included here.
" - Stride Magazine
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Although coming across as deeply personal, the reader is drawn in to enjoy a sensuous feast of observation and yearning. Allow time to savour, to taste again and uncover further flavours. These poems contain layers and pleasing depth. Nature features but not necessarily as a thing of beauty. Landscapes are bleak where life has featured hardship. There is railing against the inevitable end, alongside acceptance. Love is remembered without being named.
" - neverimitate
