Departure, The (Salt Modern Poets)

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.

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

There are moments of great lucidity and philosophical insight in Emery's poetry, and a vocabulary born from experience that doesn't cry pretentious. There is grit, but not for its own sake, and a clean intelligence lies beneath the dirt the dirt the dirt of The Bukowskis that makes way for the brave political admonitions (`The Destroyers Convention' and `Guest Starring'). It is also nice to see a dialogue poem in the form of `Carl's Job'; these are rare and, to me, pave a way forward in poetry. Emery's excellent execution of this form delivers a haunting exchange of movie-talk, and shows the range of his literary prowess: `I've no further plans on killing' I said. `Those days are done.' / `Let me tell you, Bud,' said Carl. `Those days are sitting here now.'

Chris Emery's `Departures' has affinities with those of John Hartley-Williams. A single poem can pile up seemingly unrelated images with an impact derived not from an understanding of the poem's logical surface connections, what the seventeenth century described as wit, but from the connections that Emery's images make with our emotions. A lazy reaction would be to lump him with the more overt surrealist procedures of Hartley-Williams, but I would prefer to describe his imagery sensually associative akin to the work of Elytis or Pablo Neruda.

A collection where linguistic invention and imagination combine in poems with a dazzling range of feeling never less than a true entertainment.

Studded with richly strange images and ideas, the poems, like the church bells which 'invert the town', in 'Sunday Fathers', are often skewed and unsettling: hat stands, 'wrists of ice'; snails, 'death's pale eccentrics'.

Most of Emery's poems share an immediacy, a measured brashness, but there is nothing especially uniform about this collection: there is a `cowboy song', a poem dedicated to a Victorian hangman, a visit to the frontline of a warzone, each poem shining a different kind of light on a different world of hope, or pain, or calm, or irony, or fortitude, or beauty.

Chris Emery drops you right into his poems/world, and once in you have very little chance to orientate yourself before being assaulted by the next image or poem; voices and fragments of lives hurtle past you leaving behind ghosts on the retina, neurons fired and blipping beyond the moment.

The poems made me feel and put images in my head, but I never understood why I felt that way, or how these quicksilver pictures fitted into the narratives. There is something about the quality of the images ('Snails' silently drowned in forest tears and awkward 'Sunday Fathers' wasting time by the swings ) and of the atmospheres conjured up (for me the book as a whole has a feeling of carparks and gritty sodium lights, isn't that odd!) that tells me I should trust Chris Emery and that there are more treasures to be found.

Chris Emery's The Departure is narrative poetry told by strength of deduction, the negative what-is-not-is-true, what is left. One begins to look for the Chaucerian double negative of the Knight's Tale-a way of looking, seeing defining, being that feels age-old, timeless. Emery's use of the negative feels traditional but not as a relic, rather, refreshed and furthering dark, visionary- this is what is new under the sun, or rather to express it more fittingly using the original negative from Ecclesiastes to Shakespeare as handed down the generations, there is nothing new under the sun if not this which Emery delivers new to us. Here the negative is not double, and not singular, it is multitudinous in a journey that resembles a pilgrimage, a departure that is also a beginning.