Emblem

Lucy Mercer

In ghostly conversation with the sixteenth-century emblematist Andrea Alciato – a witness to a lonely time – the poems of this debut collection are carried forward by a non-linear dream logic of metaphor and similitude, speaking pictures who remain silent and a focus on an adjacent imaginal world. As well as reusing images from Alciato's emblem book, the poems fixate on alternating relations between text and image that blur into relations between mind and body, child and mother, red and green, past and present, public and private, the living and the dead .