Praise for this Book

‘Chris Emery has an enviable gift, to be able to pack a novel’s worth of action into a few lines, and direct our eye to the moment that matters, the image that impresses, the memory that resonates. These are poems full of quiet, well, wonder.’ —Rishi Dastidar

Praise for Previous Work

‘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.’ —James Sutherland-Smith

‘In the transformative effect of real poetry, the nest comes to be seen as a human life lived, ‘sad and gorgeously dented’, but from which the creatures that made it have departed to another place: ‘to drone in apple acres / elsewhere darkening / with sweet ruin now.’ Whether we believe in such a place – and the oxymoronic ‘sweet ruin’ casts a shadowy doubt – is, with writing as good as this, hardly the point, appealing as it does, through vivid imagery, confidently written, to a fundamental human longing for continuation in the face of what we think we know of the end of life.’ —Martyn Crucefix

‘Poetry for contemplation with a strong sense of place.’ —Jackie Law, neverimitate

‘With this collection, as it follows Emery’s own path, it may be that intuitions of spirituality in sacred spaces become the unthinkable that is experienced, shaped and shared.’ —Jonathan Evens, Tears in the Fence

‘Emery is adept at taking unexpected twists and turns, surprising and delighting us as, despite his chosen route, he somehow always leads us back home.’ —Rupert Loydell, International Times