The Built Environment

Pavilion Poetry

by Emily Hasler

Emily Hasler's debut collection moves between the local and the distant, the urban and the rural, and past and present. This is a poetry of emotional density underpinned with a lightness of touch. Hasler's poems are structural but organic, detailed but lively, thoughtful but playful. There is a rare combination of exactitude and wonder which leads the reader in and keeps them there.

Often taking their cue from the work of visual artists, these poems probe at the ways we understand and reconstruct our environment. Examining places, objects, buildings, landscapes, rivers and bridges, these poems ask how our world is made, and how it makes us.

Genres: Poetry

ebook

Published November 1, 2018

About the author

Emily Hasler was born in Felixstowe, Suffolk and studied at the University of Warwick for a BA in English Literature and Creative Writing, and an MA in Pan-Romanticisms. She now lives in London.

In 2009 she won second prize in the Edwin Morgan International Poetry Competition. Her poems have appeared in various publications, including the Rialto, Poetry Salzburg, Warwick Review and Horizon Review, and have been anthologised in Dove Release, Birdbook, clinic II and Herbarium. Her poems appear in The Salt Book of Younger Poets and The Best British Poetry 2011. She is a regular poetry reviewer for Warwick Review. natural histories is her first pamphlet.

Reviews

[Juliano · Rating 5 out of 5]

‘After all, I could find no way to speak of myself / that was not crudely structural.’ Two weeks ago I finally read Emily Hasler’s The Built Environment, her fantastic debut collection of poems. In many ways succeeding (and maybe superseding?) her earlier pamphlet, Natural Histories, the poems in this book consider the world and our place in it – how we impact on it and how it impacts on us. Of the varied structures explored there are as many internal as external, each glimpsed and rendered with wonderment and love. Some of my favourite poems in the collection include ‘What Gretel Knows’, ‘Inscription’, ‘Objection!’ and ‘Building’, but really there’s not a bad one in the bunch.

[Stephen Theaker · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting little book of mostly one-page poems. I would probably need to read this a few more times and learn a lot more about poetry to properly appreciate it (so take my rating with a pinch of salt), but I particularly liked the poems about scart leads and Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney.