Modern Fog

<p>This wide-ranging and mercurial collection contains poems on landscapes living rooms love and pilgrimage birds and animals flowers grandmothers novelists and composers car parks and coastal resorts - all interspersed with modern folk tales. At the centre of the book lies a striking twelve-part meditation on the medieval church of St. Helen's in Ranworth Norfolk - known as the 'Cathedral of the Broads'. By turns bucolic elegiac or enquiring Emery's ludic poems depict our common experiences and anxieties - his conjured worlds always filled with mystery and beauty. </p><p><br></p><p>Made me think of Herbert and 'The Altar' - a powerful contemplation of presence. - JOHN KINSELLA</p><p><br></p><p>Emery brings an unusually wide-ranging poetic vocabulary to the encounters in Modern Fog depicting wildlife on the Norfolk Broads or a multi-storey car park with equal fluency. These are elegiac tough-minded poems of marked originality and scope. - ANNE ROUSE</p><p><br></p><p>Really I admire it so much. It was almost a shock to read something so densely richly packed with sounds and rhythms and words. - NIALL CAMPBELL</p><p><br></p><p>It's as if these attentive atmospheric musical poems can light up everywhere: seascapes edgelands interiors even a car park. Chris Emery's art is at once earthy spiritual dreamlike and exact. So often the language is irresistible: 'Above us in its immaculate empire / a bird whirrs up and saves / its eyes for the militant hour.' - MONIZA ALVI</p>