Unexhausted Time by Emily Berry review – language that defies all limits

‘Most feelings are very old, they have/been under the earth and then up/to the surface again.’ Photograph: ako/Alamy

In Emily Berry’s third collection, Unexhausted Time, nothing is off limits and limits themselves are consciously defied: the membrane between waking and dreaming is semi-permeable, the boundary between past and present is blurred: “How is it the things that happen to us seem to have happened already,” she asks in one unsettled and untitled poem (titles are rarities here). In another, she blends with the weather as if her body were unconfinable: “Prolonged heat made me feel smudged./It was not a bad feeling…/to be a smear on a windowpane…” Her metaphors are prone to melting too or, at least, not allowed a final say.

She has a gift for identifying feelings at the back of the mind that are like thoughts you would prefer not to think