Figured Image

by Anne-Marie Albiach

Poetry. Translated from the French by Keith Waldrop. "Anne-Marie Albiach's words are never alone on the page, having each other for company, just as they find here ideal companionship in Keith Waldrop's translation. In Figurations de l'image , Albiach pursues her rigorous investigation into the possibilities of measure, the perceptible, luminescence, vulnerability, memory, contour, ardor, breath, oscillation, remonstration, trajectory, disparity, abstraction, antecedence, disparity, refraction, trace, tapestry, rehearsal, reverberation, and the irreparable. In these poems, the figures refute image as they bank, relapse, surge, palsy, recollect. Albiach scores space to twine time, abjures rhyme to make blank shimmer in the mark."—Charles Bernstein

"In FIGURED IMAGE, Keith Waldrop has created perfectly lucid translations, making available to readers of English the most significant compilation of Anne-Marie Albiach's work since her MEZZA VOCE (The Post-Apollo Press, 1988). Waldrop's limpid immediacy negotiates with deliberate grace the complexities of Albiach's lexicon."—Donald Wellman

Genres: Poetry

94 pages, Paperback

First published October 30, 2006

About the author

Anne-Marie Albiach was a contemporary French poet and translator.

Reviews

[Jen · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent translation of Anne-Marie Albiach's collection of poems by one of America's best translators, poet Keith Waldrop. The text is evocative, evasive, moving toward and away from us in English as it has in the French. It is a series of voices, of movements "prehensile and vulnerable" crossing a "multiform silence" in a space of "excessive disintegration" and becoming. Published with a lovely cover by Post-Apollo Press, this

[Megan Kaminski · Rating 5 out of 5]

one of my favorites...I love this book