Chris Emery, "Modern Fog"

Chris Emery was born in Manchester in 1963. He is a director of Salt, an independent trade publisher, and is the former Director of Operations and Director of Development for The Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham in North Norfolk. He has published three collections of poetry, a writer’s guide, an anthology of art and poems, and edited selections of Emily Brontë, Keats and Rossetti.

About Modern Fog
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.

You can read more about Modern Fog on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection. 

From Modern Fog, by Chris Emery

Stags

          As a deer pants for flowing streams,
               so pants my soul for you

- Psalm 42 :1

When you see that they have passed like fire dreams
you wake to, you ’ll know they have run through
what ’s forsaken. You can ’t remember how
each was elegant, bronze, and silent

where now the hawthorn is readjusting,
waving briefly, having stored such regal frames.
All that remains is absence in sycamore
shoots, alder and ash and rhododendron

that seem urgent now. They ’ve gone, and the dogs
are astounded at the edge of what ’s never
fully grasped : nothing to chase into mould
and stasis below the cold fitting pines,

yet still, inside your eyes, the chestnut haunches
of the broken gods you wish to see here
are this store of grace and loss for you.
It is the last religion in these woods.


The Visit

All the grandmothers in the world
are gathered beneath a willow,
its green drapes are filled with black fly.
They are wearing Linton dresses,
garters, aprons, slippers and brooches,
and they talk about sheep or sewing.

They all agree loudly everything is dying,
even Edna with her tenacious pig,
everyone is dying or ill or drunk,
and men stink. It is three o ’clock, children
begin to squirm from red shadows
to burn like lights in the park.

The grandmothers fall silent, watching.
Some begin to cry at the bright scene
while the children roll their eyes,
wander by the willow, hot with life.
In far hills darkened by diesel, men
prepare tanks for one final visit.

Michelene Wandor, "Travellers"

 

Michelene Wandor is a poet, playwright, broadcaster, musician and teacher of creative writing, the latter on the Distance Learning MA in Creative Writing, at Lancaster University. She has written original plays and dramatisations for radio, many nominated for awards. She has written two books relevant to Creative Writing: The Art of Writing Drama (Methuen), and The Author is not Dead, Merely Somewhere Else: Creative Writing Reconceived (Palgrave Macmillan). Travellers, published by Arc Publications, is her seventh poetry collection. You can read about it, and a sample poem from it, below. Michelene's website is here. 

About Travellers

Michelene Wandor's new poetry collection travels in many directions, through Europe, the Middle East and beyond, with travellers as various as Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, Isabella d'Este and Lucrezia Borgia. Thematically, the poems alight at Greek mythology, gender, and the evergreens of love, anguish, power and tragedy. The first and final touchpoints lie in the language itself, which is both guide and sustenance. Lyrical, narrative and startlingly evocative, the words and poetic shapes travel down and across pages and spaces, and continue to resonate in mind and memory. 

You can see more information about Travellers on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read a poem from the collection. 

From Travellers

San Miniato

a divebomb at night
my right arm
something made out of nothing

A Tuscan hillside. A monastery. I sit

alone at a round table in Miravelle, the

local restaurant. Andrea, the drama

teacher, arrives. He bows a punctilious

flicks back a thick, caressing wave

of black hair over his temple, and sits at

another round table. He is an artista. 

 

I am the poet     I sit alone

overnight, my inner right arm is
angrier than a mosquito 
 

Andrea runs the summer course. He flirts

with the young women, slippy straps on 

shoulder-bare camisole tops. He wears a

black leather jacket, carries a black 

leather bag. He checks his hairline

carefully each morning for signs of

flecked grey. 

 

I am the poet     I sit alone 

the pharmacist tells me
I have very sweet blood
oil of lavender
sharp on the skin
 

Andrea opens doors for me, a code

rusted from centuries of chivalric

use. He calls it courtesy. I say they are

not the same thing. 

that night
I talk to the mosquito bite
upper inner arm red field spreads
the mosquito cannot buzz in English 
 

The acting exercises are like leather. 

Smooth. Soft. Malleable. The cool

monastery room smells of rosemary

anchovies spring to mind. I watch. 

 

I am the poet     I applaud 

bread olive oil and salt are cake
bright yellow duck egg dense omelette
hot yellow
ham and formaggio are cake
I am born into taste at my round table
white bread in olive oil
salt hits my palate
sweet and sharp
outside it rains
jasmine and eucalyptus and oleander
in the cool air my arm cools
 

The leather factories are in Ponte a Egola. 

Bus, train, TV aerials. The scent of 

tanning fills the air. Soft leather curls

round the nape of my neck, a soft black

leather jacket, loose and cooling. It fits as

if made for me. I buy it and it is made for

me. My leather lover.  

 

I am an artista 

mozzarella di bufala and basilica
red white and green
 

The end of the week. Andrea joins me at

my round table. The slippy-strap students

wave to us. Blasts of cool air from barred

windows. Outside a leaf floats, a bell, a

bird in a mirror in yellow, red and black. 

you have sweet blood
whine mosquitoes in the night
 

I wear my new black leather jacket, my

dark hair streaked with grey. Drama and

poetry. There is a buzz in the monastery

room. Listeners look out across a green

valley streaked with houses.

the mosquitoes buzz
 

we are artisti

we make something out of nothing 
 

© Michelene Wandor, 2021