Chris Emery’s most recent collection both presents, and intends to see beyond, the Modern Fog of its title. The poems revel in describing aspects of this world and – in keeping with the images on the book’s cover – the occasions for such descriptions arise from journeys (often walking – the cover shows a hand-holding rambling couple) and the highlights of such journeys are frequently encounters with creatures (the cover has a deer and a fox). So ‘The Path’ leads us past ‘chalk beds’ and ‘clay beds’ and ‘dirt paths’ to excited sightings of a jay and a buzzard. Presenting more of a pause in such a walk, ‘The Day Storm’ is composed largely of the poet’s characteristic ‘noticing’ of blackthorn, blackberry and nettle. But once the eponymous storm has passed, the trees are now found to be ‘gashed . . . / splintered’ and this gives rise to one of Emery’s most interesting observations that, in their damaged state, the trees are in some mysterious way ‘clarified’. More of this later.

There is more than a little of Philip Larkin in Emery’s work – particularly the detail-listing-Larkin of ‘Here’ and ‘To the Sea’. Emery’s ‘All the Routes Home’ offers us an inclusive list of a Roman road, a Viking lane, an unclear path, a Puritan track. The poem ‘The Bay’ might be read as a more condensed version of Larkin’s ‘Here’ as, ‘after hours of hill torture’, the trail walker arrives at a bay, dotted with ruined buildings: ‘the afterthought of winter crofting’. This image of transience, of ultimate human failure, in effect a memento mori, is softened a little with Emery’s insistence that the homesteads ‘still hold their ounce of love’. In contrast to Larkin, and reminiscent of those earlier ‘gashed’ trees (somehow being advantaged by their damage), Emery is reluctant to accept death as an absolute ending and it is in this that the reader will find indications of his religious belief.

Similar spiritual themes emerge in the many encounters these poems have with creatures. ‘The Buzzard’ is another hill walk on a ‘churchless’ afternoon, but the flight of the bird on its thermal suggests an upward aspiration, a craving that the human observers also ‘hope to crave’. There is a beautiful little poem ostensibly about a dove returning to its dovecot:  

Small snatch of air, sole white arc,

crisp handclap, then ritual landing.

All followed by cossetting and fuss

at the stoop. The laughable dance

with lots of nodding and wittering

before the tricky hop up

to the dovecote . . .

The poem is transformed to something unconventionally angelic by being given the title ‘Pentecost’. The more lengthy ‘Day Fox’ vividly captures the ‘living amber’ of the creature against the green of grass, but its death at the roadside is equally clear: ‘his pelt was tar black and slicked back / on the tiny lump of him’. Here again, Emery goes a step or two beyond the plain facts of death as, in the corpse’s decomposition, ‘the world / relaxed into him with all its fiery prayers’. To suggest this is an image of an afterlife is to lack the poem’s own subtlety, but Emery is surely probing Eliot’s idea (not original to TSE) that ‘In order to arrive at what you are not / You must go through the way in which you are not’ (‘East Coker’). The remarkable poem ‘Stags’ does this more explicitly in that the momentary sighting of the creatures is (in the poem itself) now no more than a shaky memory, an ‘absence’ that stands ‘at the edge of what’s never / fully grasped’. But the recall of their passing still has a potency as a ‘store of grace and loss’ and is here declared ‘the last religion of these woods’.

But Emery is equally at home describing the ‘dreck’ of our modern world. It’s surely more this sort of thing that constitutes the ‘modern fog’ of the book’s title. There is an NCP car park, the final destination perhaps of the couple in ‘Newbies’ who are driving along ‘old roads, lobbed estates seeping / by the rim of each roundabout’. The tacky nature of modern life is also found in ‘Edgeworlds’ which encompasses 4x4s parked up beside a ‘ratty beach’ and coach tours, detergent-smelling corridors and TV reruns. But such scenes function in this book partly as a foil to the (again) Larkinesque ‘churchgoing’ side of Emery’s character. ‘The Wall Paintings’ – a visit to St. Andrew’s, Wickhampton in Norfolk – opens, not with cycle clips, but with the equally evocative ‘thunk of a latch and then your eyes adjust’. And far more monumentally, ‘At St Helen’s, Ranworth’ is a 12-part sequence (each shaped like the church’s tower) more explicitly contemplating the building’s impact on the poet’s religious experience.

I guess I’m more attuned to Emery’s art when he is working up from the roots of the secular and material world, as in ‘One Drive in Winter’, in which the travelling couple go beyond satnav reach, the petrol tank close to empty, beyond any very obviously attractive destination, yet they still discover something worthy of a return, something about themselves, an opportunity to ‘solemnise the marginal and lost’. It may be that the great churches of the Norfolk Broads are themselves part of the category of the ‘marginal and lost’ these days and I do admire Emery’s attempts to bring them back into contemporary poetry, but I find his more slantwise and paradoxically inclined images (evocative of ‘East Coker’s ‘In my end is my beginning’) more accessible emotionally. To give one more example, in ‘The Elders’ – a poem written in memory of Adam Zagajewski – Emery again deploys an image of trees damaged after a storm (this time perhaps more metaphorically damaged by ‘revolution’) and these oak limbs also ‘lie / broken with new life’.

This intriguing collection’s two concluding poems are perhaps variations on this same theme. ‘The Start of It’ is – here’s the paradox again – the beginning of the end prior to the beginning: in this poem we read of frank intimations of mortality, of moments when ‘something abstract stiffens in the grace’ of a life, when we may come to glimpse ‘the formal shape [we] make in time’. In a completely different mode, ‘The Legacy’ eventually reveals itself to be a poem about the gentle removal of an empty wasps’ nest, its ‘featherweight’ and ‘strange paper weather’. In the transformative effect of real poetry, the nest comes to be seen as a human life lived, ‘sad and gorgeously dented’, but from which the creatures that made it have departed to another place: ‘to drone in apple acres / elsewhere darkening / with sweet ruin now.’ Whether we believe in such a place – and the oxymoronic ‘sweet ruin’ casts a shadowy doubt – is, with writing as good as this, hardly the point, appealing as it does, through vivid imagery, confidently written, to a fundamental human longing for continuation in the face of what we think we know of the end of life.