Modern Fog

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. "It's as if these attentive, atmospheric, musical poems can light up everywhere: seascapes, edgelands, interiors, even a carpark. 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