Merle Lyn Bachman: Diorama with fleeing figures
Published March 2009
Paperback, 88pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848610125
With illustrations by Evan Siegel.
The poems in Diorama with Fleeing Figures delicately point to devastating historical events. Instead of mounting judgments, the poems accrue power gently, even stealthily. Evoking a language at once lost, familiar, original, and dying, they balance fragments of culture, with a locus of Jewish Eastern Europe, against intimate imagery of the body—"the most confused part of the forest."
"'Scrimshaw,' the dictionary says, is the art of carving
or incising intricate designs on whalebone. These poems are indeed intricate
designs carved, or better, etched, if not on whalebone, then 'inside
this wrist,' as Merle Lyn Bachman writes. This is lovely, tough, needed
work. Her question: 'Where is the location of desire?' A relentless
investigation, at times celebratory, at times plangent, in tightly wound
lyrical constructs that take nothing, neither themselves, nor the world for
granted."
—Pierre Joris
"The poems in Merle Bachman's Diorama with Fleeing Figures are
intense, visceral and transformative. "We aren't meant to know so much
of the world," yet the knowing in this poetry is exactly what each of
us craves, the "translation
not yet written" that leads us to both question and believe in the depth
of human experience."
—Colleen Lookingbill
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