Emily Berry, _Unexhausted Time_

 THE FIRST POEMS by Emily Berry that I read, way back in 2020, were excerpts from this book, which was published in 2022.  I liked the excerpts well enough to buy copies of her first two books, which I also liked, and here I am circling back to “Unexhausted Time.”

The jacket copy leaves it up to the reader to decide whether this book is “a long poem” or “a series of titled and untitled fragments.” I lean toward calling the book’s first and third sections a long poem, with a middle section of prose poems serving as a kind of perpendicular element that is part of the book but not exactly part of the long poem “Unexhausted Time.” 

The long poem does seem to be composed of fragments, we could say. One could connect them into a narrative…actually, one could connect them into any number of narratives, as one could draw any number of pictures from a constellation of dots, but the story I saw was about a “you” that may have been the speaker, may have been the reader, but seemed most often to be a (possibly former) partner, with whom the speaker once formed a “we.” 

There had been a rupture, though. Possibly a death—the poem “This Spirit,” which opens the second part of what I am calling the long poem, occurs in some soft-boundaried, transitional space between this plane and the next one. More often, the rupture felt like a breakup, a separation, a divorce. You wouldn’t call it confessional poetry—far too oblique and disjunctive for such a designation—but it did feel personal and close to the bone.

The middle section of prose poems seemed to be about dreams, e.g., “I went to visit André and for some reason I had a snake with me that I had to kill.” Oddly enough, these seemed clearer, plainer, more down to earth than the poems about the “you,” as though the unconscious mind spoke a simpler, more transparent language than the conscious mind does. Well…maybe it does. 

The prose dreams share elements with the lyrical fragments of what I am thinking of “Unexhausted Time,” creating a kind of intersection, or two different paths through the same material. 

I hope her American audience grows.