In Wonder, Chris Emery brings together poems about memory, distance, and the passing of time. Moving between personal and historical landscapes, these poems reflect on grief, love, and the patterns of everyday life. With clarity and precision, Emery asks how we live with what remains.

The Poetry Society 2025 Reading Recommendations

Wonder asks how we live with history, with absence, with longing — and how we keep returning to the difficult beauty of the world.

In his fifth collection of poems, Chris Emery explores the nature of wonder in its various forms of awe, reflection, and the marvellous. The poems range from the absurd, to the historical, the comic and fantastical – dropping us into stories and places we never quite expect.

The collection considers where and how we live: in the city, in the country, on the coast, or elsewhere – and the strange lives we endure in often disparate communities, connected to each other through history and nature, and sometimes separated by it.

As with Emery’s previous work, the poems reveal the intimate and fleeting in human experience, and can delve into the mundane, reverie or dreamscape, each lyric serving to illustrate the joy of common experience, all expressed in musical and arresting language that never avoids the freight of emotion.