Review of Unexhausted Time, by Emily Berry, published in Review 31
Emily Berry’s third book of poetry, Unexhausted Time, is a sharp, memorable book, particular yet peculiar, prosaic if also dreamily poetic. In it, the self is a place of coming home, of trust and memory, but it is also not that, and ultimately the facts — reality — slip away. Little is at it seems, and seeing is not believing.
There is great pleasure in reading Berry, in the sensuousness of some of her phrases, in her English lived-in spaces. We get lines to go back to, to re-read, to re-imagine, sometimes as short as ‘I’m expecting something/and it feels like wearing a silk shirt. . .’, other times more sustained, such as the incantation:
I live, come to me, as long as my love has the
strength of the blood that gives life and the
grief of the blood that drains away, come to
me wired and wild like the bare tree and the
shedding sky. . .
And yet, there is rarely a poem that allows the self to retain a sense of firm ground - and a kind of electrically charged angst becomes evident - or is suddenly unleashed. The shortest poem of the book is quite astonishing, made all the more exhilarating by its on-the-page language and off-the-page horror:
A faint whisper of contagion, then a cloud.
Everything in the diary crossed out.
This is poetry of pleasure yet doubt, of dreams that are as likely to be nightmares, of an inventiveness that can be playful or painful. Berry’s words can appear clinical, but the ubiquitous ‘I’ is never still, and remains unconquered. I put Unexhausted Time down with a feeling that poetic creativity, imagination, will keep dejection at bay — not a bad way to end this year.
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