Have Been and Are

Have Been and Are
AuthorBrook Emery
GenrePoetry collection
PublisherGloria SMH Press
Publication date
2016
Publication placeAustralia
Media typePrint
Pages70pp.
ISBN978-0-9945-2753-0
A821.3
Preceded byCollusion 
Followed bySea Scale 

Have Been and Are (2016) is a collection of poetry by the Australian writer Brook Emery.[1][a]

Contents

The collection contains 39 poems, some of which had been previously published. As Jenny Henty notes in her (2017) review, "the title of each poem (except the last) is a quotation from a novelist, poet, scientist, philosopher or composer".[2]

  • "And the word 'environment' "
  • "Brain doesn't improvise"
  • "We are lashed to our body"
  • "The poet is a centipede"
  • "Body is but a striving"
  • "At the end of the mind"
  • "To get the better of words"
  • "The poem must"
  • "The rain falls down"
  • "The most important experience of being"
  • "I'm not sure"
  • "World without hope"
  • "I, too, find the flower beautiful"
  • "No more than"
  • "To make the universe"
  • "We behold all things"
  • "Everything waste"
  • "Only keep still, wait, and hear"
  • "Echo, repetition, statement"
  • "Stately, plump Buck Mulligan"[b]
  • "A steady delete"
  • "The right time to write"
  • "The situation is hopeless"
  • "The brown current"
  • "A preposterous hodgepodge"
  • "What were they then"
  • "He was describing, "
  • "The lightness, the non-mass of it"
  • "There on the shore"
  • "But it would be loathsome stiff"
  • "Drive, he sd"[c]
  • "I should be rolling down the skyway"
  • "If you write deplorable twaddle"
  • "You want ghosts"
  • "What is spoken is never"
  • "A spring day like this"
  • "Endless forms most beautiful and wonderful"
  • "Broken / Beautiful"

Critical reception

The collection has been reviewed.[2][3][4]

Notes

  1. ^ The collection's title ("Have Been and Are") and the title of its penultimate poem ("Endless forms most beautiful and wonderful") were taken from the very last sentence in Darwin's Origin of Species (1859): "Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."
  2. ^ Malachi Roland St. John "Buck" Mulligan is a fictional character in James Joyce's 1922 novel Ulysses. The poem's title is taken from the novel's opening passage: "Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned: Introibo ad altare Dei."
  3. ^ "drive, he sd, for/christ’s sake, look/out where yr going.": Creeley, Robert (1962), "I Know a Man", p.38, For Love: Poems 1950–1960, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. ISBN 0-684-71738-7 — also, see: "I Know a Man", at Poetry Foundation.

See also

Footnotes

References

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