The title of the remarkable opening poem ‘Very Like a Whale,’ quotes Polonius, agreeing with Hamlet on the allusive shape of clouds, a scene with which actors have massive interpretative scope. It can be played as pure comedy or as satire at the vanity of the world: the feebleness of conventionality and its discomfort with madness. But there is also a deeper thread of reflection in the dialogue, on the vast gulf of perception that separates human understanding and communication; the power of the human imagination to see both, or either, a whale or a weasel. There is comment on the partial nature of metaphor, while reality and perception change with the rapidity of clouds. Emery’s poem picks up all these traces in a meditation which raises questions about seeing and interpreting our place in the world, among the countless other species:

one more clay figurine with beseeching hollows
                               where the eyes should be,
                               as different from the others
as I am the same, no more evolved
                               than a roach,
                               no better than a rat,
                               happy as a labrador in the sun.
       This is grace, the rest is commentary
       And I would let it go: in millennia

I’ll chatter metaphysics with a chimpanzee, now
my thoughts are the antlers of the Irish elk
                   the wings of flightless birds, peptides
                   spelling out the phrase
                   very like a whale.                             

‘Very Like a Whale’ also refers to Richard Dawkins’s experiments in computer generated evolutionary selection, described in The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design (1986). The ‘peptides’ of the poem are simulated adaptions, fragments of the phrase ‘methinks ’tis like a weasel’ generated through a mathematical mixture of chance and selection. Echoing Hamlet, they also draw on the famous hypothetical about monkeys and typewriters.

Amongst the ubiquity of references to the language of science in contemporary Australian poetry, it is a great relief to see such a complex understanding. Emery’s approach to evolution, contingency and randomness seems to write directly against the conventional poetic pose which pits a tragic individual imagination against the unfeeling ‘real’ of natural and evolutionary processes. Emery’s position is one of wonder and active questioning, rather than rage at his own inconsequence.

This is a poetry of interaction and engagement, even when it despairs of seeing truly in ‘this suspected light’. Though suspicious of its own subjective perceptions, it does not take the stance of Romantic disappointment which lurks behind much poetry that despairs of individual perception or language.

The quiet, meditative poems are punctuated by four ‘Monster’ poems dealing with war and atrocity. These are interspersed throughout the book, so the reader is returned often to ideas of violence, cruelty and evil, in the same way that the mind is, in daily life, repeatedly forced to approach and recognise evil. The Monster poems ask which light we use to look at atrocity – is this the part of life that is ungildable by art or perception? From the first Monster poem: ‘Uncommon light sheds little understanding, / what is manifest leaves little room for hope.’ And from the last: ‘I am not // a soul in the darkness of the world but, / let’s face it, this isn’t working, there is no / bloodless blood, no wafer unalloyed.’

It is encouraging to see poems able to encompass such black ideas without self-pity or self-dramatisation. This is a voice which has absorbed the weight of ancient theology, modern philosophies, science, politics and current affairs, and ancient responsibilities. The poems accept and drama-tise equivocation, to build a provisional and unfinished balance between joy, question and despair.

Elizabeth Campbell’s review was placed second in the 2008 ABR Reviewing Competition.