Unexhausted Time

Unexhausted Time by Emily Berry revels in the search for words that might capture the indescribable, while offering beautifully bizarre renditions of quotidian life. Simile is the driving engine in many of these poems, some of which lead us to expect one image (“Her mouth glowing red and crisp” suggests apple) and instead provide something entirely different (“like the dying end of a cigarette, / not out yet”). Such surprising leaps weave their own associative magic:

I thought it was you withholding something,
but was it me … ? I was trying to catch hold
of this gorgeous tiny black fish that swam
vertically, like a seahorse … Thought it was
maybe a tadpole that would turn into a frog.
This feeling … something sweet and sharp in it,
like sugar and burnt oranges … like a felt-tip
across my lungs … I can’t see your inwardness,
but I know the shape of it … The star inside of
yourself, I thought I saw its points tonight.

Unexhausted Time draws on lines from the likes of Javier Marías, Elizabeth Chatwin, and Sigmund Freud, which are italicized and embedded within the poems like snippets of speech overheard in sleep. Indeed, there is a dreamy quality throughout this collection, whose middle section is comprised of poems in block text that relate dreams—some sad, some sensual, some vulgar. Berry also highlights the contradictory nature of dreams and the ways in which they are always given to a range of interpretations. In one poem, we observe a city with “a perfect, unbearable glow,” and in another, a lover has a “stupid, / beautiful face.”

On rare occasions, the curtain is pulled back for self-conscious asides on the business of poetry (“I don’t know why you care so much about / other people’s poetry”), though such meta commentary feels most compelling when encased in images:

Writing was a mist rising off my life, that’s all,
dependent on atmospheric conditions for its
existence.