Sea Scale: New & Selected Poems

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Sea Scale: New & Selected Poems
Sea Scale, New & Selected Poems.jpeg
Author Brook Emery
GenrePoetry collection
PublisherPuncher and Wattmann
Publication date
2022
Publication placeAustralia
Media typePrint
Pages291pp.
ISBN 978-1-9225-7109-0
A821.4

Sea Scale: New & Selected Poems (2022) is a collection of new and selected poetry by Australian writer Brook Emery. [1]

Contents

Contents

The collection contains 31 new poems, and a selection of poems taken from five previous collections.

Sea Scale: New Poems

  • "Self Portrait: Provisional Sketch"
  • "Devote Less Time"
  • "Rendezous"
  • "Pickpocket"
  • "The Heart of the Matter"
  • "Meditating"
  • "as if / the moth"
  • "As Light Seeps In"
  • "Implicated Witness"
  • "The Stars at Night"
  • "In the Art Gallery"
  • "Tree Roots, Bellingen"
  • "Undiminished"
  • "Contra Lorca"
  • "A Shaft of Sunlight"
  • "Joe Palooka"
  • "Voltage Across a Membrane"
  • "The Eremite in his Cave"
  • "Between Time"
  • "The Traveller Reminisces"
  • "My Bald Head"
  • "Letter to Tristram Shandly, Gentleman"
  • "Big-Time Wrestling"
  • "Culture"
  • "The Dandelion's Puffball"
  • "On or About December 1910"
  • "Velcro"
  • "Half the Sins"
  • "Posthumous Existence"
  • "The Kid on the Billycart"
  • "Self Portrait: Sea Scale"

From and dug my fingers in the sand (2000)

  • "and dug my fingers in the sand"
  • "Physical"
  • "Song of Songs"
  • "Cowboys"
  • "My Father's Eyes"
  • "Shellac"
  • "With My Father-in-Law"
  • "Crossing the Border"
  • "Infidelity"
  • "Improvising with Flaubert"
  • "Underfoot"
  • "Letter to a Live Poet"
  • "any and all means""
  • "The Distance and the Heat"
  • "At a Slight Angle"
  • "Approaching the Edge"

From Misplaced Heart (2003)

  • "The mind is a small bird hovering"
  • "Sunday"
  • "A Raven Before the Dove"
  • "Letter While Flying"
  • "The mind is a tightrope walker balanced"
  • "Let it go (hold on to)"
  • "We do only be drowned now and again"
  • "The mind is a body breathing in unconsciously"
  • "The mind is a kind of theatre and we""
  • "Aubade and Evensong: New Year 2003"
  • "Prequel: Sequel"
  • "Commentary: Two Days"
  • "The mind is the surface of a pond expanding"
  • "For a Child"
  • "For My Brother and Sister"
  • "And asked her how she was"
  • "Final Belief"
  • "The mind is a misplaced heart lopsidedly"
  • "Postscript: Like Picasso"

From Uncommon Light (2007)

  • "Spring"
  • "Very Like a Whale"
  • "Morning: Thinking of You"
  • "Finches Perhaps"
  • "Monster"
  • "Sunday: (Everything can be) transformed"
  • "That Beat Against the Cage"
  • "'Am I really the person who bears my name?'"
  • "Monster"
  • "Against Immortality"
  • "Tourism: what the I sees"
  • "Uncommon Light"
  • "Thirty-six Views of Bondi Beach"
  • "Monster"
  • "Narcissus: self portrait with sea"
  • "Half-glimpsed through water"
  • "This Disenchanted World"
  • "Monster"
  • "Spring is Still Spring (Summer)"

From Collusion (2012)

  • "Dear K, it's light that makes the river flow"
  • "After the lassitudes of blue"
  • "It's almost spring in our neglected hemisphere"
  • "In the hour or so before night's certain fall"
  • "Waking at night silence has the colour"
  • "All morning it's been difficult to settle"
  • "A low pressure cell is tracking up the coast"
  • "I remember very little"
  • "I want to say the word 'adrift' "
  • "You know the way a snatch of song"
  • "I can eclipse you with a wink"
  • "Contested ground, this strange persistent beauty"
  • "It appears we are machines to manufacture words
  • "In the background there is the music"
  • "Gloom off to the west"
  • "I walk among the dead"
  • "Autumn warmth is draining from the day"
  • "I almost understand this resonance"
  • "Rain as it is only brighter"

From Have Been and Are (2016)

  • "And the word 'environment'"
  • "Brain doesn't improvise"
  • "We are lashed to our body"
  • "The poet is a centipede"
  • "Body is but a striving"
  • "At the end of the mind"
  • "To get the better of words"
  • "The rain falls down"
  • "The most important experience of being"
  • "Everything waste"
  • "Only keep still, wait, and hear"
  • "Echo, repetition, statement"
  • "The brown current"
  • "A preposterous hodgepodge"
  • "What were they then"
  • "The lightness, the non-mass of it"
  • "There on the shore"
  • "A steady delete"
  • "Drive, he sd"
  • "I should be rolling down the skyway"
  • "Stately, plump Buck Mulligan"
  • "You want ghosts"
  • "A spring day like this"
  • "Endless forms most beautiful and wonderful"
  • "Broken / Beautiful"

Critical reception

    "Sea Scale collects the work of a major poet. Its outlook — "demotic/philosophical" as I’ve described it earlier — seems to derive from its location. It’s a Sydney book in ways which it would be difficult to be too satisfactorily specific about...
    The new poems are begun with an extended set called "Self Portrait: Provisional Sketch" and concluded with another set "Self Portrait: Sea Scale". This piece of structural organisation in miniature encapsulates something that can be seen as a crucial dynamic within all of Emery’s work: the tension between the reasonably aleatory processes of the mind that his work has always acknowledged and the desire to impose some kind of structure or order on the poetic expression of it. ...
     [And, upon re-reading Emery's selected earlier] poems (Emery’s first book was published in 2000), I’m struck [by] the tensions between the accurate delineation of process — especially the processes of the mind — and the desire to make aesthetically satisfying, even beautiful (a word that many of Emery’s poems worry at) structures." — Martin Duwell, Australian Poetry Review. [2]

See also

Notes

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