Dr. Mephisto

...vivid, pungent stanzas...

Broadcasting from Planet Sky into our theatre of hate comes a louche, latter-day Mephistopheles. Satire and mock-allegory wear out the dramatic personae as we, the readers, refuse to audition for the part of Faustus. More Marlowe than Goethe, things really catch light when the lines go lyrical. Ghosts of punk offer up trills of the damned, but a secular scepticism is on keyboards. Think of Orson Welles and Marlene Dietrich in A Touch of Evil and dream of new dawns.

This is a remarkable debut collection by Chris Emery. He possesses an attack vocabulary and has the ambition to think the unthinkable. Cross yourself before reading Dr. Mephisto.

With poems in this collection Chris Emery establishes himself as a developmental writer of growing stature: not only is his own voice increasingly evident and developing rapidly, but the technical development of possibilities in his language is also a palpable achievement. Most importantly, these developments are by no means the arid movements of intellect alone: underpinning them is a linguistic awareness which is by turns moving, physical and fun.