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.
Made me think of Herbert and 'The Altar' - a powerful contemplation of presence. - JOHN KINSELLA
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
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
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
