Modern Fog: A Review of Chris Emery's Fourth Collection

Wednesday, 19 March 2025 at 17:33

MODERN FOG

Chris Emery – Arc Publications £10.99

After twelve years this is a long overdue collection, following “The Departure” which I recall reviewing with some enthusiasm. Emery is a poet who breaks the unwritten rules with regard to making his poems available to a potential public by posting drafts for comment on Facebook and Instagram, then generously responding without resentment to adverse critical comment and flattering his critics by changing a poem if he feels the criticism warrants it. He’s a generous soul who’s provided me with opportunities to exercise my critical faculties in a way I haven’t been able to since the demise of Poets’ Workshop at the beginning of the 1980s. Poets’ Workshop was the progeny of the Group and continued the practice of rigorous, sometimes even harsh criticism of Philip Hobsbaum, the founder of The Group. The late Jack Carey, a much-neglected poet,once told me of an evening at Poets’ Workshop where one hapless member had presented his batch of six poems for discussion by the workshop and had had five of them mercilessly eviscerated. He read the sixth poem and those present felt that he’d taken enough of a beating and were generally complimentary until Peter Porter commented “I’m afraid I’m going to bitch this one, too.” Happy days for the Puritan poet critic. Since then, workshops have degenerated into a miasma of nurturing encouragement which has combined with diversity initiatives with the unfortunate consequence that a poem is often regarded as good largely because of its origins, whether occasion or the individual who has written it.Criticism of how a poem is made whether in terms of structure, imagery, quality of language is often dismissed as misogynist, homophobic, racist or lacking in empathy. It is a kind of trahison des poètes.

“Modern Fog” could not be accused of this. The contingencies of nature, history, race, religion,class, location and personal circumstance lurk sometimes palpably in the hinterland of an Emery poem but the reader’s attention is never diverted from a primary awareness that they are reading a poem, artwork made from language. Modern Fog is a collection of impressionistic poems whose materials are language rather than paint or music and therefore likely to baffle readers who require that a poem be plain in setting and meaning. However, Emery instinctively knows that language can never be that precise and ambiguity lurks even in seemingly the most transparent utterance.In the best of the poems this ‘fuzziness’ has been harnessed to marvellous effect. In “The Novel” an urban landscape at night has “Wild Euclidean allure”a sumptuous marriage of sound and vision that makes a sordid downtown vista magical. The unfashionable material of religion has led to a marvellous little poem “The Wall Paintings,” demonstrating Emery’s love of the unusual collocation, “Inside, we stall with love below a pictured hare.” Emery makes no secret of his Catholic faith; it’s part of the warp and weft of his poetry andas with skilful weavers a reader hardly doesn’t find the impulse behind the craft distracting. The closing couplet is cunningly wrought from simple language with an alliterative music:

‘As you are, we were; as we are,you will be.’
All the days fail finally with such reclaims as this.

Emery’s faults are evident in the first part of the book. He has a gift for startling metaphor, but the pedant in me balks at the tyro error in mixing metaphor and simile in “Edgeworlds,”
where ‘long rain / works its wild skirts through / memories like a knife.’ The great actress, Dame Edith Evans observed on an over-the-top performance by the young Donald Wolfit, that there was too much, but so much better than too little. Emery just has to trim away the excess and the result is always a good poem.

The centre piece of the collection is “At St. Helen’s Ranworth.” At a minor level it’s a rejoinder to Larkin’s “Church Going,” the definitive Anglophone poem on the absence of religious faith. At a major level its verbal invention and musicality put it on a par with Briggflats although Emery is Catholic as opposed to the Quaker Bunting. It consists of twelve poems of thirty lines.Twelve is the number of perfect order in the Catholic church and multiplied by thirty is 360, the number of degrees in a circle, the perfect geometrical figure and the perfect view from the top of the tower of the church of St.Helen’s. The narrative of the first three poems is concerned with the protagonist’s climb to the top of the tower. The allegorical elements are plainly evident, but never intrude on Emery’s descriptive and narrative strengths. Somewhere in the subconscious of this poem is the second part of Dante’s Divine Comedy, the ascent of Mount Purgatory. Religious feeling permeates Emery’s poetry, yet never preaches to the reader. Christendom is part of the culture of Europe:

The story that
holds the story, the matter of it
that reaches us from a common tree,
a thriving binding root.

The remainder of the sequence is a meditation taking in the landscape of theNorfolk broads, the sea and the interactions of history and the present world.In the last poem of the sequence chaos briefly threatens:

I’m glaring at blue birch scrub
that bears no name, its unfenced
mad mosaic subsiding to glottal life.

“Unfenced” brings us back to Philip Larkin and the hesitant endurance of faith in the last line of the sequence: “thin light knits, then spreads.”

The final part of the collection exercises Emery’s gifts as a nature poet. Echoes of Hughes in The Frost Wife, Robert Graves in The Visage and Edward Thomas in One Drive in Winter are evident. “Hares” is a bravura poem which will no doubt be anthologised when such collections become fashionable again. NCP is a wonderful transposition of nature poetry into an urban setting rendered in visceral, if readers will excuse a poor pun, concrete detail.

I notice that the spine of my copy of “Modern Fog” is already creased from re-reading. It’s a wonderful collection. Buy it.