Emily Berry, _Dear Boy_

READING EXCERPTS THAT have appeared here and there from a longer poem called "Unexhausted Time" got me sufficiently interested to buy Berry's first book (she has three out, it looks like). 

Her poetry seems English to me--by which I only mean that I can't think of any Americans who sound much like this. American poetry gravitates to the confrontational rather than the clever, the earnest rather than the fey. You would have to look for a while, I think, to find a recent American poem that opens in any way reminiscent of the opening of "The Tea-party Cats":

We're suspicious of the tea-party cats;

we don't know why. They all turned out so well

today and aired their charming characters;

they were so smart they frightened us to death.

It is easy to imagine a recent American poem that, like "Some Fears," catalogues fears, but not one that includes "fear of colour leaking from vegetables" or "fear of ill-conceived typography." Similarly, it's had to imagine any American poet since Millay writing a poem like "When Will You Carry Me to the Fair," even with tongue in cheek, and even if it ends on the lines, "Lover when will you pull a root from the earth / and show me its straggly ends?"

The hypotenuse that runs between "clever" and "fey" we might call "whimsy," but I would rather not use that word. It would just give you the wrong idea. Whimsy would work on Instagram, but Berry is too dry and scary for Instagram. Too intelligent, for that matter.  Whimsy might well be the word one initially reaches for first in talking about "Hermann's Traveling Heart," a poem about a tortoise in love, but "whimsy" is too close to "cute" to apply. Even Berry's humorous moments, which are frequent, wouldn't pass any cuteness test.

Judging from the excerpts from "Unexhausted Time" that I read, Berry's new work is as many strides beyond her early work as North was beyond Death of a Naturalist, but I certainly enjoyed it, and very much want a look at the second collection.