Emptiness: Asian Poems 1998-2012 gathers for the first time work John Mateer has written and on occasion published in South-East and North Asia. From the teeming cities of Singapore, Tokyo and Beijing to the quiet of a Malaccan street, a Honshu mountain or even a Malay cemetery in Cape Town, Mateer's journeys are out into the unknown world and deep into the mind. As with his other volumes which collected poems written in South Africa, Iberia and the Arab world, these poems are patient investigations of language, selfhood and history. They can also be as anecdotal as a reflection on the life of a Sumatran monkey captured for sale. If read as a companion to The West: Australian Poems 1989-2009, this collection reveals life on the eastern half of our globe. Like the early twentieth century French poet and archaeologist Victor Segalen, who is key to the book's later poems on China, Mateer always affirms the power and pleasure of the foreign.