And dug my fingers in the sand

And dug my fingers in the sand

Author	Brook Emery
Language	English
Genre	Poetry collection
Publisher	Five Islands Press
Publication date	2000
Publication place	Australia
Media type	Print
Pages	110pp.
ISBN	0864186428
Dewey Decimal	A821.4

and dug my fingers in the sand(2000) is a collection of poetry by the Australian writer Brook Emery. ^{[a] [1]}

Contents

The collection contains 51 poems.

• "and dug my fingers in the sand"
• "King Lear at Nambucca Heads, 1988"
• "Seascape I"
• "Fruit Salad"
• "Infidelity"
• "Song of Songs 5 : 2"
• "Breathing and the Wind"
• "lithosphere"
• "Crossing The Border"
• "Demeter"
• "Pinball Rider"
• "Near Brooklyn"
• "Daylight Saving"
• "Improvising With Flaubert"
• "Cowboys"
• "My Father's Eyes"
• "Shellac"
• "With My Father-in-Law"
• "Abstract"
• "She"
• "A Twist Of Hemp"
• "The Distance and the Heat"
• "Interstices"
• "Postcards"
• "Driving Home"
• "Being done, there is no pause"
• "Learning to Dive"
• "Physical"
• "Approaching the Edge"
• "Imagined Seas"
• "Geometry"
• "Friday Night"
• "Interior with Windows"
• "What's Left Out"
• "April"
• "Flags crack and wrap"
• "Kato (HD - 1220)"
• "Rear Window"
• "any and all means"
• "Taking Stock"
• "The Next Step"
• "Three Feet"
• "Milgate's Dog"
• "Pure Mathematics"
• "Skink"
• "The Pelican Poem"
• "Beat Once More"
• "Letter to a Live Poet"
• "Underfoot"
• "feather, stone, bird, sand"
• "At A Slight Angle"
• "Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth"

Awards

• 1998 – The Denis Butler Memorial Award, for the poem The Distance and the Heat. ^[2]
• 1999 – The Australian Sports Poetry Award, for the poem Physical. ^[3]
• 1999 – Newcastle Poetry Prize , for the poem Approaching the Edge. ^[4]
• 2001 – Judith Wright Calanthe Award for Poetry, Queensland Premier's Literary Awards for the collection and dug my fingers in the sand. ^[5]

Also, another four of the collection's items had been recognized:

• "Postcards" — runner up, 1999 Banjo Paterson Writing Award. ^[6]
• "lithosphere" — commended, 1999 Robert Harris Ulitarra Poetry Prize. ^[6]
• "any and all means" — commended, 1998 Tom Collins Poetry Prize. ^[6]
• "Imagined Seas" — short-listed, 1998 Josephine Ulrick Poetry Prize. ^[6]

Critical reception

"Brook Emery’s strongly crafted collection ... [offers] much memorable insight, beauty and precision in conflict with strategic monotony. [Emery's] act of writing this valuable collection could be seen as digging fingers in the sand in an attempt to preserve personality, affection, and accumulated knowledge in the face of natural dissolution . . .
Emery is a poet of processes more than things, and the exciting processes he analyses are made more vivid by contrast to the persona they transcend. There is sometimes a sense of the persona beginning to unite with these natural processes, as if liberated by as well as from universal energy and decay. — Jennifer Maiden, Australian Book Review . ^[7]

See also

• 2000 in Australian literature

Notes

1. "To get past big waves, swim underneath them ... In open water races competitive swimmers will hold the sea floor, digging their fingers into the sand and using this handhold to propel themselves forward underwater, letting the wave pass overhead. Holding on to the sea floor stabilises your position ... " (Kate Rew, "How to Swim under and through Waves", p.20 in Rew, Kate (2022), The Outdoor Swimmer's Handbook: Collected Wisdom on the Art, Sport and Science of Outdoor Swimming, Random House UK. ISBN   978-1-8460-4728-2)

Footnotes

1. "And dug my fingers in the sand / Brook Emery", National Library of Australia.
2. Emery, Brook (2000), "The Distance and the Heat", Cordite Poetry Review, Nos.6-7, (2000), p. 30.
3. Emery, Brook (2000), "Physical", Antipodes, Vol.14, No.2, (December 2000), p. 133 (JSTOR   41958113).
4. First published at pp. 11-15 of Pretty, Ron (ed.) (1999), The Argument from Desire: The 1999 Newcastle Poetry Prize Anthology, Wollongong, NSW: Five Islands Press, 1999. ISBN   978-0-8641-8567-9
5. Beatty (2001).
6. See: Emery, Brook (2000), "Acknowledgements", at p.iv of his and dug my fingers in the sand, Five Islands Press.
7. Maiden, Jennifer (2000), "A Poet of Processes", Australian Book Review, No.225, (October 2000), p. 53.

References

• Beattie, Peter (2001), "Ministerial Statement (18 October 2001)", Legislative Assembly Hansard, Queensland.

External links

• And dug my fingers in the sand at AustLit