Sea Scale comprises thirty new poems and a generous selection from Brook Emery’s previous five volumes. From and dug my fingers in the sand, his first book, to Have Been and Are, his most recent, reviewers have noted the fluency and tactility of his writing and the range of his thinking and allusions. His poetry is speculative, always wondering, occasionally playful, always trying to make sense of the complexities of the material, spiritual and rational worlds. The inter-weavings of mind and brain, language and culture, nature and society, time and memory are all swept up in this enquiry. His particular skill is to render abstract and intellectual issues in sensuous and physical imagery. Ever-present is the sea which, while sometimes performing metaphoric or symbolic functions, is always its material self: ‘the glittering humpbacked sea, the thousand flickering things the mind lights on and tries to hold.’‘His poems have a polished elegance that combines love of nature and wonder at the artistic impulse that keeps us alive to the potential to behave in a civilised manner towards each other. He is a first-class craftsman whose rhythms, like the flow of his language, seems effortless.’ – Judges’ comments, Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize‘Brook Emery’s new collection, Have Been and Are, continues in the vein of what might be called the philosophical-demotic established in recent volumes such as Uncommon Light and Collusion. I don’t think anyone in the cohort of contemporary Australian poetry does this quite as well as he does.’ – Martin Duwell, Cordite Poetry Review
