Unexhausted Time

by Emily Berry

Unexhausted Time inhabits a world of dream and dawn, in which thoughts touch us 'like soft rain', and all the elements are brought closer in.

Feelings, messages, symbols, visions . . . Emily Berry's latest collection takes shape in the half-light between the real and the imagined, where everything is lost and yet 'nothing goes away'. Here life's innumerable impressions, moods, seasons and d�j� vus collect and disarrange themselves, while a glowing, companionable 'I' travels the mind's landscapes in hope of refuge and transformation amid these displaced moments in time. Whether one reads Unexhausted Time as a long poem to step into or a series of titled and untitled fragments to pick up and cherish, the work is healing and inspiring, always asking how we might harness the power of naming without losing life's 'magic unknownness'. By offering these intangible encounters, Emily Berry more truly presents 'what being alive is'.

'Emily Berry has a refreshingly free, not to say incendiary, approach to poetry.' Observer

Genres: Poetry, Audiobook

76 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2022

About the author

Emily Berry is a poet, writer and editor. She grew up in London and studied English Literature at Leeds University and Creative Writing at Goldsmiths College. Her debut poetry collection Dear Boy won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Hawthornden Prize. She is a contributor to The Breakfast Bible, a compendium of breakfasts, and is currently working towards a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing at the University of East Anglia.

Reviews

[Ada · Rating 5 out of 5]

Uaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaau!!!!!!!!!!!

L'he tornat a llegir. Li he pujat una estrella perquè realment és una passada.

[emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

Extremely mesmerising, intensely beautiful collection of poems! Slaps you in the heart. Berry is one of my favourite poets, and this was too dreamy even though I (couldn't help but) have pretty high expectations of her new poems. There is even a poem written 'after Johnny Flynn' (insert that meme of Jenny Slate screaming; iykyk). Proper RTC later.

[Tommi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Emily Berry’s newest collection is elusive in its dreamlike images, but it has just about enough traditional coherence for me to enjoy as a whole and look for themes that connect poems to one another. If her previous work, Stranger, Baby, was “about” the death of a mother, Unexhausted Time is, to me, more meta in the sense that it appears to center on the possibilities of language itself. Maybe? Lots of dreams, dangers, and omens, too. Who knows what it is “about”? I guess it’s not a relevant question to begin with.

[ciel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Silent-in-awe version of "screaming, crying, throwing up" - maybe somnambulantly walking in to the North Sea in mid-February (slow-motion scene, some seagull scream), not feeling a thing?

[Sandra Saade · Rating 4 out of 5]

To write a poem, you must fall in love …
I did it many times. Beneath the trees
through which I walked in tears,
in wet school uniform. Tonight
the two dimensions of his face
will stare at her forever. I would fall
through a tear in time to get there,
I would fall through a tear in the story.
I had what I had, and it was never enough.
I didn’t know and I didn’t know.
The wind riffles through the chapters
of my life and something incurable and sad
starts up like a nineteen-year-old rain …

[ocelia · Rating 5 out of 5]

a perfect collection in my humble opinion!!!

[Caspar "moved to storygraph" Bryant]

I'm pretty clear that I'm a fan of Dear Boy, EB's debut, though Stranger, Baby was a little less interesting to me? Anyway expectations all over the shop for this one and I absolutely love it. I think her best work. So sophisticated, but Berry and luminous altogether.
I'm terribly sick of the way intertexts are effectively used as crutches for a lot of contemporary poets and this collection is absolutely swarming with them I just think it's a rare case of them Actually working. Proust, Fisher, and Chris Marker, my love! The silence of poets on the remarkable, miraculous Marker is terribly upsetting to me & I'm glad Berry's holding the fort here it's the perfect ray of complexity for her. perhaps that's intimidating too since I want more Marker in my life

[Emily]

“At the end of the world I would remember you
the way a tree remembers, reaching down
into the earth for messages. I would mark
your final gestures in disordered time
so that I could be waiting on the shore
for your return, so that the end
could come at the beginning.”
—Emily Berry.

[Goodreeds User · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yeah, sensational

[Vaiva Paulauskaite · Rating 1 out of 5]

Hated it. Every moment of it and it’s completely biased, I know. I can’t even explain why I did. Perhaps that’s how it is with poetry, you either feel moved by it or not.

[Liván · Rating 3 out of 5]

Este libro es muy interesante, pero me pareció un poco tedioso y a veces plano. Imágenes muy potentes y poemas muy fuertes entre medio tho; me gustaría releerlo.

[The Cozy Nook · Rating 2 out of 5]

There were very few that I liked. Still can't believe I read the word 'selfie' in a poem.

[Tulika · Rating 5 out of 5]

A refreshing perspective on relationships and purpose

I liked the way the Emily encourages us to look in a new way at our expectations from relationships, coping with loss and welcoming change. Her poems reflect the purpose and worthlessness of our thoughts making it an intriguing read...

[Jonas Hill · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is incredible. Maybe Emily Berry’s best.

[Madison · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you like dreamlike poems that are more ethereal, this is for you! This collection is quirky.

It also totally threw me off. It felt completely different than Emily Berry’s previous works, which is probably a positive thing (something new for a poet - love and respect that).

I wish this book had started with a preface telling me more about what I was about to read (stylistically). I think I would’ve been able to appreciate it more had that been the case. Instead, I felt pretty lost in it and I’m still not quite sure what I read. This collection felt disjointed and random to me.

I am a big fan of Emily Berry’s poetry. This collection just wasn’t for me. Give it a shot though! Talented poet.

[Mackenzie · Rating 2 out of 5]

read in one sitting. lip was my favorite i wish the whole book was like that. nocturne too. i really liked the angrier poems, the ones with more bite. very easy and smooth read but lowkey tumblr 2010s poetry vibe.

[Erin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked the middle prose section the most.

[Dina H. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sublime.✨




(In a dimly lit room)
In a dimly lit room I practised saying an awful thing. If she could stand it, I would survive. I held my breath and did not look. Your body like a long stem. I am the flower.
I do not know if I have bloomed yet.
It was late, and over the city there hung a perfect, unbearable glow.



Street
Walking along the street one afternoon I found myself abreast of another pedestrian who, for whatever reasons, perhaps the same as my own, could not bring themselves to generate a surge in pace sufficient to overtake me. So we continued in that way for some time, almost companionably, and when at last something did compel them to break away I felt a pact had been torn and I knew once and for all that my worst fears were true: I was all alone in the world and no one could save me.




(The night prints itself upon me)
The night prints itself upon me and I cannot decide yet, whether to come to you whole, or wait until I am gone. The end of the bed shrouded in fog, thoughts touching my face like soft rain. I must content myself with such perfect things as these: traces of disorder, burning couplets, very fierce inspiration.
Slept continuously for three days and nights, like every true mystic. My voice falling over the threshold like light. But you can't come in.



(Light)
Light stretching my late summer shadow long over parched grass, low sun, this alive, this evening. Light of mid-morning picking out all the trees' capillaries, black against the light of blue's possibilities, would I rush outside to see this, yes I would, this light? It's so kind, it remembers me. Light of first thing, spilled
sky
mixing day up, all the colours that go into
day,
you wouldn't believe how many. Hard light to be walked into like a mirror, day coming down hard on its sharp edge; you can never really see yourself the way others do, that's the hard thing; or is it a good thing? (God doesn't answer prayers, people do.) Light as sunbeams that lie on the floor of your room like ways through, they're not real ways through they're just a reminder that there may be a way through. See how the cat anoints herself in the sunbeam, for she knows she is not mortal and is waiting for the sign ...



(It was as if I were asleep)
It was as if I were asleep the whole of my life and I didn't know a thing, nothing on the inside, not that life was life, or death is death, how I was right or how I was wrong, that nothing lasts and there's no one to blame, and nobody gets out of it, not even you, not even me, nobody gets out of it alive, but as long as I live, come to me, as long as my love has the strength of the blood that gives life and the grief of the blood that drains away, come to me wired and wild like the bare tree and the shedding sky.
after Mary Oliver & Tina Turner

[Paul Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think British people have a particular problem with sadness. We live in it. We’re marinated in it. Look at our miserable, pale faces.
But we can’t express it. Partly this is because we’re embarrassed by strong emotion, partly because there’s a sense that we don’t deserve the indulgence of self-pity, partly there’s a sense that we’re letting the side down, we need to keep up the morale of the other troops, or something.
This is why, when sadness is expressed in writing (or anywhere else), it makes me feel so joyful. I laughed my way through this collection. ‘Street’ is hilarious with it’s final line; “I was all/ alone in the world and no one could save me.”
But humour is there in these poems. Emily Berry could be a stand-up comedian. The way that she has created a character of herself, that is not herself, but makes some reference to herself. One of the reasons she does this is to mock herself. And this seems like a classic move in the British expression of sadness. If you can show that you have some self-loathing, you can be excused making a scene. It’s like a License to Kill for James Bond.
In Denise Riley you have a sense of sadness as a radioactive material that must be treated with extreme care. First of all, you mustn’t elevate it or enlarge it. Secondly, you mustn’t diminish it. You have to get the exact measure of it. It’s a tricky customer.
I felt that same sense in Unexhausted Time of a careful balancing, but Berry uses humour and that trying-on of different characters that gave me the feeling of a stand-up act. That’s not to say the poems don’t feel heart-felt, but the assumptions of the I in the Lyric poem are not taken for granted.

[Carly · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was a little unsure about this one to start off with. The writing was fine from the start but I was a bit lost with it, with what it was about.

Was it a relationship? Were the poems/stories/parts connected?

I couldn't tell, but pressed on becaue I'd been so impressed with her last book, and the writing here was still very good.

Then I got to the middle section (different in style and tone from the start) and thought, oh god, no, i can't deal with this. But I was wrong, totally wrong.

It was just such a shift in style, and the pieces were sort of dreamlike, and I loved them and kept wanting to go back for more (I read really slow, so going back for more means leaving it alone for a day or two before eagerly reading the next bit, and maybe not even that, maybe reading the bit before because I liked it so much).

So that was the excellent middle/second section. Then the third part was... very much like the first; a continuation, maybe? Again, I was a bit lost, but I feel that if I just knew what the subject/story was I'd be okay with it. So only one star off just because (despite the fine writing) I wasn't entirely sure where I was with those outer parts, while very much enjoying the middle.

And I will likely go back to it, someday, slowly, and hope I can figure it out a little more. Or else hope to hear some sort of explanation in the meantime...

[S P · Rating 5 out of 5]

'You trod your lonely path and I trod mine,
and no one would drink from my tap but me,
this water which wouldn’t stop flowing.
Irrevocably, the born arrive, and they can’t
be put back, no, but who on earth would want
to put them back. I reached a door, passed
through it, reached another door, and so it
went on, there was nobody at home to greet me.
Once I saw someone I thought I knew.
What if just under this layer of life you could
find the old one, moving forward just the same,
and just above, what’s yet to come, would I
know myself if I met me now, coming the other
way back then. I couldn’t think of any reason.
When she had something painful to tell, it was usually
her way to introduce it among a number of disjointed
particulars, as if it were a medicine that would
get a milder flavour by mixing. I’ve been watching
a tall thin tree bending over and back
in the wind. Mama mia, how can anyone bend
so much without breaking? I said I had been lost
in a fantasy world in which I could travel freely.
She said the fantasy world was this one.
At the hour of my death I did not die,
but was born again in this life.'

(p55)

[George · Rating 4 out of 5]

The longer sections of this book, the semi-untitled freeish blank epic opening section, feel a little like they are assembled out of aphorisms, turning left and right to drop neatly formed insights and striking descriptions, never quite congealing into a unified movement. I really like the middle section, which is like a series of prose poem vignettes or dream sequences, perfectly timed for comic effect or grave insight as the case may be. My favourite is “Bad Stone” which reads like it would make for an amazing live performance, insistently setting up a moral takeaway from a somewhat absurd situation — “Increasingly the stone looked clouded, like an eye losing sight, and it had a faint grey vein becoming, I felt sure, more pronounced, as if it was old and tired of enduring the dark nights and the squeaking of bats and the cold and the rain and the moon’s relentless phases and its sanctimonious light and my refusal to claim what belonged to me” (44–45).

[Juliano · Rating 5 out of 5]

“I have seen poetry unleashed / by a single line, but I have not known where it got to”. Emily Berry’s third collection Unexhausted Time may be the best poetry volume I’ve read in years — astonishingly accomplished, dreamlike and dark and searching. The poems feel fragmentary, moving across thoughts with unusual lightness, yet also feed into one another, like a cerebral concatenation, giving this collection the feeling of a long poem. So many of the poems caught my attention immediately, resonating as sharp pangs of tender recognition: ‘This is the story of a man marked by an image’, ‘Scholar’, ‘To write a poem you must fall in love…’ and ‘Late spring evening, air smudgy with pollen’ all standouts, along with the dazzling three-poem-run with ‘Empty’, ‘Street’ and ‘Boat’. Berry’s work speaks so intimately to our time and does so from a place of great knowing, as well as vulnerability. “I would fall / through a tear in time to get there, / I would fall through a tear in the story.”

[David Karlsson · Rating 4 out of 5]

4+

Jag har läst och läst om den här diktsamlingen under ett par veckors tid och upplever att den likt sin titel fortfarande är outtömd, att den har mycket att ge.

Dikterna rör sig ofta kring just tid. Det är inte sällan natt eller gryning, ljuset spelar roll liksom träden men det är ändå de mänskliga relationerna som står i centrum även om konturerna av dem ofta är vaga.

Ibland lånar eller parafraserar Berry andras formuleringar i kursiv stil - titeln kommer exempelvis från Anne Carson - men eventuell djupare innebörd av dessa citat är inte helt klar för mig. Men under min pågående läsning av "På spaning ..." tackar jag aldrig nej till en Proust-referens när det bjuds.

Bokens mittparti består av korta prosalyriska texter, ibland nästan mikronoveller. Kanske är det dessa jag gillar allra mest, men det är samtidigt de sidor jag läst om minst antal gånger.

En mycket bra diktsamling med andra ord, av en poet som innan detta var helt okänd för mig.

[Tamara]

I feel like it's almost tradition to start the year off with a poetry collection now.

I've read Emily Berry's two other Faber collections in the past. I wasn't obsessed with either of them but I did enjoy quite a few poems in each. This collection feels much less grounded in comparison. I found it felt languid, whimsy, and dream-like, and I think the writing really leans into this.

I enjoyed the imagery throughout the entire collection, it was always clear and clever and never left me confused. I found Berry's language choices and enjambments were clever as well and helped keep the poems playful.

I wouldn't say this is a new favourite collection, but I appreciated the writing. If anything, this collection taught me that poems can be weird. Write those wacky dreams, just make them beautiful.

[Lucy Allison · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this collection! It was different than I expected - I’d only read Bad New Government by Berry before, and although some of these poems had political aspects to them too, they felt a lot less explicitly about any one topic. For me, they brought to mind the summer between leaving school and moving away from home, particularly the first section, while the second section had a more surreal feeling reminiscent of a dream journal. I didn’t like the third section as much as the others - some of the figurative language was a little tired and the poems failed to make an impact on me personally - but I’d definitely like to revisit this book.

[Nicole H · Rating 5 out of 5]

In between 4/5 on this one, but I loved it!

I read this slowly and really tried to ingest it all. Berry is an incredible writer. The details and lyricism of her poems are so vivid, emotional, dreamy! I bookmarked almost every other poem in the book 😅 I especially loved the second section- gods, bad stone, holes.

I would love to listen to someone read this aloud to me, maybe a friend. Will be reading this one again :)

[Katie · Rating 5 out of 5]

A favourite contemporary poet. I loved her previous collection 'Stranger, Baby'.
Playful, yet haunting. The language is dream-like, as though words are dancing around your mind in a playful way but with darker undertones.
A beautiful collection of surreal prose poems dealing with subjects like grief, death, love, loss, heartbreak and even a poem dedicated to the love of watching her dog sleeping.

[Em Langan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Blown away by this poetry!! This is the first book I've read where I finally understand when people say that they feel like a book was written for them. So many of her poems moved me deeply and brought to life thoughts and ascertains, that I could relate to and helped me understand the world.

Brilliant!