The persona is depicted as middle class, humane, well-meaning, athletic, and a little didactic, even pedantic, in a benign school-teacherly fashion. He is placed in situations which are suddenly lovely or suddenly bizarre: in many poems he is a holidaymaker or physical/metaphysical explorer. As in the lectures of a successful schoolmaster, there are lists of interesting and not so interesting details interspersed with macabre asides and sympathetic self-revelation. While the metre carefully embodies the persona, the writer allows himself and the reader much more freedom than this summary suggests. He writes of the Summit Walk to Kosciusko, above the tree line: ‘All is surface here, touch, / all exposed and grinding / blue sky’s a spinning blade’ and then ‘the wind as rough as carborundum’ where ‘Things grate together / crack apart / and slowly wear away.’ The ‘Carborundum’ places the school-teacherly persona at the scene, but – as the quote shows – Emery is a poet of processes more than things, and the exciting processes he analyses are made more vivid by contrast to the persona they transcend. There is sometimes a sense of the persona beginning to unite with these natural processes, as if liberated by as well as from universal energy and decay.

In this above, he resembles Beaver, whom he addresses in ‘Letter to a Live Poet’: ‘I drizzle on, dripping with Wordsworthian affirmation, and forget the thing itself.’ He does not have Beaver’s poignant, intimate air of studied spontaneity, but the Wordsworth self-comparison is interesting. His general tone is not very enthusiastically pantheistic but then neither was that of Wordsworth. Processes in Emery seem disparate, not omniscient nor available for synthesis. When he lists many disastrous news items in the context of the persona’s daily life, they are not integrated or given dual function, which adds to his effect of helplessness and numbness.

The anapaestic metre, however, does have another fascinating dual function. While slowing the rhythm of the persona, its inevitability increases the force or ferocity of the surrounding natural processes. The persona does not dig his fingers in the sand in sensuous investigation but rather so as not to be swept out to sea: ‘this really speaks of death as I’m older now and frightened / the bay is overfull of spilling crests and water ripping in and out … ‘. His reason then intervenes with academic reflection: ‘They say South coast tidal waves washed boulders miles inland / … seven thousand years ago. I can well believe it. I’ve seen waves / leave rocks as big as gravestones on the beach … ‘.

It is also true, of course, that the act of writing this valuable collection could be seen as digging fingers in the sand in an attempt to preserve personality, affection and accumulated knowledge in the face of natural dissolution, but in long poems like ‘Imagined Seas’ (‘Bedlam fills our sails / and crosswinds drive our needs back upon themselves’) the persona seems almost sadistic in concentration on technology and tragic exploration, as if Voss were captaining the Starship Enterprise. On the Magellan expedition: ‘He left Seville with five ships, two hundred / and seventeen men or thereabouts. Del Cano returned / with just one ship and barely twenty men.’ He continues, ‘When I lie by you, am I touching another or myself, can we be considered separate …?’

The persona treats science and art with informed reverence, but like geographical exploration they do not offer rescue. It is the dangerous universal processes themselves which offer him rescue and some difficult form of safety, just as the anapaestic metre roars and reassures and the dark ‘converged’ on that illuminated radio, at a moment when the persona’s sense of tree self was shown to be restored by his awareness of emptiness.