Chris Emery

Biographical note:  Chris Emery lives in Cromer with his wife and children. He is a director of Salt, an independent literary press. He has published two previous collections of poetry, a writer’s guide and edited editions of Emily Brontë, Keats and Rossetti. His work has been widely published in magazines and anthologised, most recently in Identity Parade: New British and Irish Poets. He is a contributor to The Cambridge Companion to Creative Writing, edited by David Morley and Philip Neilsen.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781907773150
ISBN:  9781907773150
Author:  Chris Emery
Title:  The Departure
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BB
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  DCF
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  15-Mar-12
Extent:  80pp
Height:  198 mm
Width:  129 mm
Thickness:  11 mm
Weight:  120 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 12.99
Price:  USD 23.95
Rights:  World

Short description/annotation:  Emery’s new book presents a dazzling array of voices: art dealers, TV stars, killers, cowboys, poets, coat check boys, checkout girls, composers, priests, gods, angels, winners, losers, lovers, the newly born and the dearly departed.

Main description:  At the centre of Emery’s third collection are a series of narrative poems that reveal an astonishing range of personas, from the set of Mission Impossible, an extra from Gojira, porn stars, bombers and executioners — even Charles Bukowski turns up to take a leak. There are Pennine journeys, war zones, the Norfolk coast, the Suffolk coast, riots, bad hotel rooms and crazy conventions. Even the secret life of peas. Interspersed among all these are poems concerning the mysterious ‘M’.

Table of contents:
Snails
On the Making of Entrances
The Departure
The Gathering
Lake Watching
Dandelions
Carl’s Job
The Destroyers’ Convention
On Leaving Wale Obelisk
Duke Bluebeard
Rita’s Creatures
The Interrogation
Southwold
Sunday Fathers
The New Play at The Astoria
The Goose Moon
No. 1 Cowboy Song
Shrimpies
On Great Endings
Theology
M1 3LA
The Canal
Oh, the Day
Afterwards
Apollo at Celaenae
On Great Cities
Boys’ Town
Guest Starring
Bukowskis
The Naming Convention
Unlit Minor Fog
The Museum of TV
Willow
The Publisher’s Desk
Cropping
All Our Yesterdays
Ending Up
On the Small Print
Lost Brother
From the Frontline
Damaged Enamel
Fat Diaries
A Northern Icarus
Down at Jim’s Place
A Short History of the Manchester Riots
The Victorian Amusement
Coast
Motel Sentences
Promenading

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Excerpt from book:  

Southwold

The Girl from Ipanema floats out
from the Sole Bay Inn as we take note
of the ash-grey granite
of the two-up two-down opposite.
It has a charcoal push bike
leaning on the door’s black velour.
The grocer’s swells with fruit;
the brewery sports its brands
with a tame veneer of gold.

The lighthouse pokes its tibia
into the sloe-blue night,
fathoming out the sea’s soft rushes.
We hear the darker pebbles
with their hems of foam, faintly clacking
their blind buds together.
All these comings and goings
where the beach’s groynes order
the waves’ chemical procession.

Our landlady’s pensive as a courtesan.
She reads the papers in the empty lounge.
Her mornings ‘re scooped out between regulars.
Her red jowls mark out
the egg and tomatoes of each sallow breakfast.
All for the taking. The perfect scallops
of roof tiles on beach huts, painted like teeth.
The slow sedans of this temporary commune.

Now starlings in pyrotechnic, half-baked flight
swoop to eaves sharpened with gorgeous,
apostolic light. So much to claim,
as the sea’s womb bursts and adopts
one column of light
from an aching corn-yellow moon.
We’re spruced up, mediators in an evening,
swollen from cities and chalking up meaning
below the swashes of the power lines.

Remember this weather. Summers silted up
like the vanguard of some redemption.
Just pan left and take a wide angle
as the score changes and we change reels.
Now that swollen moon drops and kicks up
a class finale. The brass dampened, throbbing,
as the strings come swooping in with
Fred and Ginger, dancing the perfect closing steps.

Unpublished endorsement:  In his aptly-named new collection, Chris Emery shows he still has the talent to surprise us with a perfectly-managed change of direction and range, showing (in the words of one of his poems) a new "fantastic ordinary face". A fresh accessibility is achieved with a richness of striking and imaginative language that will impress his existing readership, and reward the new one this book is certain to attract. There is plenty of humour here alongside genuine political commitment, a lot of real human feeling between its sharp satirical edges, kissing as well as broken teeth. Anybody interested in the contemporary poetry of these islands will have to read this book.

Ian Duhig

Unpublished endorsement:  The poems in The Departure possess (and are possessed by) such intent, detailed, living brilliance, it is like reading a series of captivating novels compressed to their musical essence.

David Morley

Unpublished endorsement:  Chris Emery's poems are like highly compressed short stories that we enter at high speed. Once in, the place is full of vivid detail keeping our head turning. A good deal of the world is there  with all its proper names, staring back at us as if it desired calm but knew things were on the move. Sometimes surreal, sometimes baroque, at other times darkly playful, the world is as in ‘Snails’ “Tonight we will pile them, pile everything of them / into the whorl of a bucket and then we will fill it / to the top with forest tears and let the silence do its work.”

George Szirtes

Unpublished endorsement:  There's an immediacy and something familiar in the way the poems of Chris Emery's new collection address the reader. They impel us to engage, to join the moment, the experience, the thought, and to consider what’s being prised open or experienced. The ease with which he develops irony and yet is freshly lyrical is almost reassuring. This is a very sophisticated and controlled poetry, language rich, but also surprising and at times gloriously tangential. What matters most is that it urges us to confide, to share – written because it has to come out, but also because we might like to listen. Emotions work with sensations and retain the intelligence that has so characterised Emery’s earlier writing. Who are we, where am I, how do we all relate to a wider world with its still and frantic moments? This book expands horizons, acerbic and poignant, constrained and ecstatic at once.

John Kinsella

Review quote:  The narrative poems are like snapshots of longer stories, like watching ten minutes of a film – you want to know more. The ‘location poems’ feature such vivid imagery, so real that you’re right there – “a charcoal pushbike leaning on the door’s black velour”. Emery shows no sticking rigidly to poetic form, taking the theme of departures around a tour of haiku, sonnets, couplets, free verse. It’s all here. The words are working hard – “the day moon is a wok”, “the sea’s womb bursts” – painting a vivid picture in your mind’s eye. The breadth of this collection is tremendous, but my absolute favourite is the title poem ‘The Departure’, about leaving yourself and diving into your art.

Michelle Teasdale
Winning Words

Review quote:  These words matter: these contexts, these agonised, pained, joyous, hilarious worlds.

Catherine Edmunds
Goodreads