Brook had two siblings: a younger brother, Curtis Leigh Emery, known as "Leigh", and a younger sister, Stephanie Gail Emery, later Stephanie Gail Rumball. He married Susan Jean Dixon, also a teacher, at Grafton, New South Wales in 1972; they had three children: a daughter, and twins (daughter and son).
Education
Secondary
Emery was a talented student; and, having won a New South Wales Government Bursary to commence his secondary studies in 1962 at Vaucluse High School, he not only went on to pass in all five of his H.S.C. subjects in 1967 (the first year of the Higher School Certificate in New South Wales), but was also listed in the "Order of Merit" for his "meritorious performance in [his] attainment of passes at first level in the Higher School Certificate examination" in both English and Modern History.
At 13, and competing in the 14 Years category, he swam for Vaucluse High School in the Combined Eastern Suburbs High Schools Swimming Carnival. Swimming in three different events on the same day, he came third in the 55 yards Butterfly, second in the 55 yards Breaststroke, and second in the longest distance contested in that age division, the 220 yards Freestyle. Both Emery brothers were accomplished surf swimmers.
Belt rescue
The first-ever public demonstration of the reel, line, and harness — given by members of the Bondi Surf Bathers' Life Saving Club, at Bondi Beach, on 24 March 1907. The reel's inventor, and Bondi's first Club Captain, Lyster Ormsby, is the lifesaver at the left of the back row.
Gaining his Bronze Medallion from Surf Life Saving Australia in 1965, he was one of 20 members of the Bondi Surf Bathers' Life Saving Club to be awarded a Patrol Efficiency Pennant for his efforts during the 1964/1965 season. He was a regular member of the Club's beach patrol teams over eight seasons (1964/1965 to 1971/1972). On 22 February 1969, a day when many of Sydney's beaches were closed because of "dangerous rips and high seas", Brook made a real-life belt rescue of a man who had been "carried 100 yards to sea by a strong rip" at Bondi Beach.
Rescue & Resuscitation (R & R)
Rescue & Resuscitation (R & R) was a challenging competition involving a team of six, within which a rescue was simulated, with the designated "patient" (maybe 100 metres out to sea) and a "belt-man" — wearing a harness connected to a life saving reel operated by another member of the team — and the remaining three lifesavers in charge of the playing out the (cotton coated in beeswax) line as the rescuer ran from the beach, swam out to the "patient" and, with the assistance of their team-mates' line-pulling assistance, returning the "patient" to the shore (i.e., the "Rescue"). Then, with the "patient" lying on the beach, "Resuscitation" was simulated.
Over eight seasons Brook Emery was a regular member of the Bondi Club's R & R competition team: the Junior R & R team in 1964/1965, 1965/1966, and 1966/1967; and the Senior R & R team in 1967/1968, 1968/1969, 1969/1970, 1970/1971, and 1971/1972, when the Senior team, with both Brook and Leigh as members, came first in the 1972 NSW State Championship, first in the 1972 Australian National Championships, and won the 1972 Australian Surf Life Saving Premiership (BSB.8, pp.3,7,8).
Club Captain
In the 1970/1971 season Brook Emery was the Vice-Captain of the Bondi Surf Bathers' Life Saving Club (BSB.7, p.14); and, at the age of 22, he was the captain of the Club for the 1971/1972 season. He left the Club after the 1971/1972 season due to his posting to Grafton, in the far north-east of New South Wales, as a teacher.
When interviewed in 2013, Emery not only observed that "much of my writing is about the sea", but also that "I've been a surfer all my life and both my books [viz., and dug my fingers in the sand (2000), and Misplaced Heart (2003)] are full of the sea and the surf"; and, in 2016, he stressed that, as a surfer, he was "a body surfer rather than a boardrider".
Poems
His first-ever published poem, "Tapping the Market", appeared in Education, the Journal of the New South Wales Teachers Federation in 1993. His poem, "Crossing the Border", which appeared in Southerly in 1994, was the first of his poems to be published in a literary journal. His poem, "Pinball Rider", which appeared in Spectrum, the Saturday Supplement to The Sydney Morning Herald, in 1997, was the first of his poems to be published in a newspaper. His poem, "Death at Birth", which appeared (p.26) in Helen Annand's (1998) The Second Worst Thing: Poems on Surviving the Death of a Child, was the first of his poems to be published in an anthology.
Publications
In addition to Education, Southerly, Spectrum, and The Second Worst Thing, his poems have been published in a wide range of publications.
Anthologies
His poems have also been included in a number of anthologies, such as: The Second Worst Thing (1998); The Argument from Desire (1999); New Music (2001); Ten Years Live (2001); The Opening of Borders (2001); Time's Collision with the Tongue (2001); Open Boat, Barbed Wire Sky (2003); Reunion (2003); Suburbs of the Mind (2004); The Honey Fills the Cone (2006); The Road South (2007); The Best Australian Poetry 2008 (2008); 60 Classic Australian Poems (2009); Guide to Sydney Beaches (2009); The Puncher & Wattmann Anthology of Australian Poetry (2009); The Best Australian Poems 2010 (2010); The Best Australian Poems 2011 (2011); The Best Australian Poems 2014 (2014); Falling and Flying: Poems on Ageing (2015); Prayers of a Secular World (2015); The Best Australian Poems 2015 (2015); and Writing to the Wire (2016), etc.
In 2013, along with the Australian poet and 2004 C.J. Dennis Prize for Poetry and Judith Wright Calanthe Award winner Judith Beveridge, the psychiatrist and poet Jennifer Harrison, and the British poet and 2009 T. S. Eliot Prize winner Philip Gross, as head judge, Emery was appointed to the four-member judging panel for the prestigious (2014) inaugural $15,000 University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor's Poetry Prize. He was appointed judge of the Shoalhaven Literary Award for Poetry 2016.
Works
Dissertations
1983: Emery, Nigel Westbrook, The Road Novels of Jack Kerouac, M.A. Dissertation, University of Sydney. (A physical copy of the dissertation is held in the Rare Books & Special Collections division of University of Sydney's Fisher Library.)
2003: Emery, Brook, King Lear's Clothes: Addressing the Line in Twentieth Century Poetry, Ph.D. Dissertation, School of Language and Media, University of Newcastle. (A physical copy of the dissertation is held in the Collections division of University of Newcastle's Auchmuty Library.)
Articles
1993: Verse: "Tapping the Market", Education: Journal of the New South Wales Public School Teachers Federation, Vol.74, No.11, (23 August 1993), p.19.
1994: "The Fed Rep's Lament" (a poem), Education: Journal of the New South Wales Public School Teachers Federation, Vol.75, No.1, (7 February 1994), p.8.
1994: "Excellent Comprehensives", Education: Journal of the New South Wales Public School Teachers Federation, Vol.75, No.1, (7 February 1994), pp.15-16.
2016: "Made it his mission to make Australian poetry visible": Ron Pretty October 16, 1940-June 30, 2023 (Obituary), The Sydney Morning Herald, 9 August 2023.
Essays
2003: "Reviewing", pp.106-113 in Ron Pretty (ed.), Practical Poetics, Wollongong, NSW: Five Islands Press, 2003. ISBN978-0-8641-8741-3
2005: "As Natural as Football", Five Bells, Vol.12, No.1, (December 2005), pp.24-27.
2009: "Fiction and Prose: Thin Partitions do their Bounds Divide", Five Bells, Vol.16, No.4, (September 2009), pp.36-40.
2010: "An Argument about Measure: Marking and Making the Line", Five Bells, Vol.17, Nos.1-2, (December 2010), pp.127-137.
2014: "Not So Much a Thought: Poetry and Philosophy", Axon: Creative Explorations, Vol.4, No.1, July 2014.
2016: "Adapted for Land—A Lungfish writes the Sea", Plumwood Mountain Journal, Vol.3, No.1, February 2016.
2020: "Voltage Across a Membrane", Axon: Creative Explorations, Vol.10, No.2, December 2020.
2007: Uncommon Light (a compact disc sound recording of 16 of the collection's 32 poems), River Road Poetry Series, No.2, Spit Junction, NSW: River Road Press. ISBN978-0-9804-1481-3
2010: Emery, Brook (ed.) (with Victoria Haritos), Science Made Marvelous Series: Earthly Matters: Biology and Geology Poems, Potts Point NSW: The Poets Union Inc. ISBN978-0-9805-4202-8
2010: Emery, Brook (ed.) (with Victoria Haritos), Science Made Marvelous Series: Law and Impulse: Maths and Chemistry Poems, Potts Point NSW: The Poets Union Inc. ISBN978-0-9805-4201-1
2010: Emery, Brook (ed.) (with John L. Sheppard and Victoria Haritos), Science Made Marvelous Series: Holding Patterns: Physics and Engineering Poems, Potts Point NSW: The Poets Union Inc. ISBN978-0-9578-5645-5
2011 – $25,000 for Poetry: Australian Council Literature Board Grant for Developing Writers.
Notes
↑"My dad died when I was twenty-five/(I wasn't there; my mum had died before)./The heart attack that killed him/left him little time to age, or me to fret./Life just stopped on that sudden note." — "With My Father-in-Law", and dug my fingers in the sand (2000), p.41.
↑"I try to name myself,/the given name I never use, mother's forgotten maiden name,/the surname I inherited and have already handed on." — "Improvising with Flaubert", and dug my fingers in the sand (2000), p.31.
↑"When my son popped up from beneath tight-fisted foam/his first words were, "I'm alive, I'm alive." His twin sister/whom I'd pushed into the face of an earlier wave before I turned/and failed to grab my son — I couldn't hold him — was paddling now/with a group of surfers three times her size and trying not to cry." — "It's when the plane takes off", Collusion (2012), p.47.
↑"To get past big waves, swim underneath them ... In open water races competitive swimmers will hold the sea floor, digging their fingers into the sand and using this handhold to propel themselves forward underwater, letting the wave pass overhead. Holding on to the sea floor stabilises your position ... " (Kate Rew, "How to Swim under and through Waves", p.20 in Rew, Kate (2022), The Outdoor Swimmer's Handbook: Collected Wisdom on the Art, Sport and Science of Outdoor Swimming, Random House UK. ISBN978-1-8460-4728-2)
↑The collection's title was taken from the very last sentence in Darwin's Origin of Species (1859): "Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."
↑Emery makes special mention of the Vaucluse High School's motto Lumen Scientiae ('The light of knowledge') in his poem, "Self Portrait: Provisional Sketch" (Sea Scale: New & Selected Poems, pp.15-22, at p.15).
↑Brook was the Bondi Surf Bathers' Life Saving Club's Junior Surf champion in the 1964/1965 season (BSB.1, p.13), and Leigh was a member of the Australian Surf Lifesaving Team for three years: 1970—1972 (BSB.9, p.61).
↑The Junior team, with Brook as a member, came fifth in the 1965 NSW State Championship (BSB.1, p10).
↑The Junior team, with Brook as a member, came second in the 1966 NSW State Championship (BSB.2, p.18).
↑The Junior team, with Brook as a member, came second in the 1967 NSW State Championship (BSB.3, p.16).
↑The Senior team, with both Brook and Leigh as members — with Brook as "patient", and Leigh as "belt-man" (TSH.1, SMH.4) — came first in the 1968 Sydney Metropolitan Championship, first in the 1968 NSW State Championship, and third in the 1968 Australian National Championships (BSB.4, p.20-21).
↑The Senior team, with both Brook and Leigh as members, came third in the 1969 NSW State Championship (BSB.5, p.19).
↑The Senior team, with both Brook and Leigh as members, came first in the 1970 NSW State Championship, and fourth in the 1970 Australian National Championships (BSB.6, pp.14, 18).
↑The Senior team, with both Brook and Leigh as members, came first in the 1971 NSW State Championship, and third in the 1971 Australian Inter-Club Championships (BSB.7, p.15).
↑Pretty, Ron (ed.) (1999), The Argument from Desire: The 1999 Newcastle Poetry Prize Anthology, Wollongong, NSW: Five Islands Press, 1999. ISBN978-0-8641-8567-9
↑Leonard, John (ed.) (2001), New Music: An Anthology of Contemporary Australian Poetry, Wollongong, NSW: Five Islands Press, 2001. ISBN978-0-8641-8692-8
↑ Hicks, Sue & Gardner, Danny (2001), Ten Years Live: Ironic, Satiric, Sardonic, Humorous Verse, Cremorne, NSW: Live Poets' Press, 2001. ISBN978-1-8631-9012-1
↑The Opening of Borders: An Anthology of Poetry by Participants at the XXI World Congress of Poets, Sydney, 2001, Ryde, NSW: World Congress of Poets, 2001. ISBN978-0-8641-8658-4
↑Owen, Jan & Boyle, Peter (2001 ), Time's Collision with the Tongue: The Newcastle Poetry Prize Anthology, Wollongong, NSW: Five Islands Press in collaboration with Coal River Press, 2001. ISBN978-0-8641-8698-0
↑Hicks, Sue & Gardner, Danny (2003), Open Boat, Barbed Wire Sky: Poems for Refugees, Cremorne, NSW: Live Poets' Press, 2003. ISBN978-0-6464-2122-3
↑Ianssen, Robyn, Copello, Beatriz & Davis, Ann (eds.) (2003), Reunion (Poems by XXI World Congress of Poets), Ryde, NSW: Robyn Ianssen Productions, 2003. ISBN0957735677
↑Bean, Joan Marion & Blaney-Murphy, Kelly (eds.) (2004), Suburbs of the Mind: A Poetry Anthology, Gosford, NSW: Central Coast Poets Inc., 2004. ISBN978-0-9585-9973-3
↑Pretty, Ron (ed.) (2007), The Road South: An Anthology of Contemporary Australian Poetry, Kolkota, India: Bengal Creations, 2007. ISBN978-8-1903-5243-7
↑First published at pp.11-15 of Pretty, Ron (ed.) (1999), The Argument from Desire: The 1999 Newcastle Poetry Prize Anthology, Wollongong, NSW: Five Islands Press, 1999. ISBN978-0-8641-8567-9
↑In her review of Pretty's The Argument from Desire, within which Emery's prize-winning poem appears, J.S. Harry (2001, p.210) notes the significance of the judges (Joanne Burns, Heather Cam, and Mal Morgan) awarding Emery's poem first prize when there were so many entries to choose from: "the 1999 Newcastle Poetry Prize drew twenty kilos of submissions".
↑"2002 Competition". 2002 Competition. 5 April 2003. Archived from the original on 5 April 2003. Retrieved 14 October 2025– via National Library of Australia.
Magee, Paul (2016), "'We do not know exactly what we are going to say until we have said it': interview data on how poems are made", New Writing, Vol.13, No.3, (September 2016), pp.434-449. doi:10.1080/14790726.2016.1203955