On Wonder: Why We Still Need It

📖 New Collection: Wonder

Published by Salt Publishing this November.

🌿 Discover more about the book here

“I bet they each turn all their feathers into a primal coat / of darkness close to wonder.”

— Wonder

What happens when a rook dies? The opening poem in my new collection, Wonder, asks this plainly enough. But beneath the question is another, quieter one: What remains? What is gathered up and carried forward, even through grief, even through loss?

The answer the poem offers is as simple as it is profound: wonder remains.

The word itself has been worn thin by years of use — pressed into service for fireworks and breakfast cereals, for tourist brochures and gadget launches. But at its root, wonder is neither sparkle nor spectacle. It is astonishment. It is the staying of breath. It is the human instinct to stop, to look again, to allow the world to act upon us.

The poems in Wonder grew out of this conviction. That there are things in the world which deserve not just to be seen, but to be attended to. Small, difficult, ordinary things: a rook’s dark coat, the rain song of the chaffinch, the foreshore’s salt air, the awkward hours lost on a petrol station forecourt.

It’s not the grandiose that calls for our attention, but the near-at-hand. The overlooked. The persistent. As one poem has it:

“Mother said, ‘Learn to love a small life,’ / between these weak rivers, ruptured fields…”

— The Small Life

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The Mystery at the Heart of Things

There’s something I’ve come to understand — though not always easily — about wonder: it doesn’t offer answers. It asks that we stay with the questions.

This is where wonder and uncertainty become companions. To wonder is to accept that we do not fully know. And more than that — that we may never fully know.

There’s a temptation, especially now, to seek clarity, to tidy the mess, to reduce the world into something explainable, measurable, resolvable. But wonder works against this. It doesn’t simplify. It invites us to stand before the mystery and remain there — not rushing to conclusions, not retreating into certainty.

If poetry has taught me anything, it is this: some things should remain unfinished. Some things are meant to remain strange.

In this sense, wonder is not just a feeling — it’s a practice. A way of living with complexity, with ambiguity, with the unresolved. It is, perhaps, a kind of faith: faith not only in the possibility that not knowing is enough, but in the sacredness of mystery itself.

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The Work of Staying Awake

The American poet Mary Oliver wrote, “Attention is the beginning of devotion.” I’d like to think these poems ask the same of their readers — to begin with attention, and perhaps to find some form of devotion there. Not worship, but care. Not sentiment, but witness.

When I was writing these pieces, I kept returning to the same stubborn question: What does it mean to pay attention in an age of cynicism? What does it mean to stand still long enough to let the world catch up with you — without demanding that it explain itself?

The answer, if there is one, is not complicated. It’s there in the rook’s mourning, the seabird’s call, the idle glance between strangers, the shimmer of a coin caught in the curve of a pavement. It’s there in not rushing past these things.

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An Invitation to Wonder

This collection is not a manifesto. It doesn’t tell you how to feel. But it does offer a small suggestion: that perhaps we might still find something to marvel at. That even now, even here, there is more than we can name.

It asks — gently — if we might live more comfortably with uncertainty, and find, in that space, not fear, but grace.

And if the poems have any blessing to give, perhaps it is this one, caught in the fierce, bright ending of another piece:

“Make haste, it sings, Brings us wonder, bring rain.”

— It’s Here Again

Thank you for reading. I hope you’ll stay with me for more reflections from Wonder in the weeks ahead.

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Author’s Note

📖 New Collection: Wonder

Published by Salt Publishing this November.

🌿 Discover more about the book here

Chris Hamilton-Emery is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Modern Fog (Arc Publications, 2024). He is the founder of Salt, an independent literary press based in the UK. His work explores attention, memory, and the uneasy privilege of being alive.

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