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.

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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.

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