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Emblem
Emblem is the debut collection from Lucy Mercer, winner of the inaugural White Review Poet’s Prize. Emblem revitalises this forgotten hybrid form in the present as a frame to contemplate the obscurities of motherhood, faith and the interior.
In ghostly conversation with the sixteenth-century emblematist Andrea Alciato – a witness to a lonely time – the poems 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.
In ghostly conversation with the sixteenth-century emblematist Andrea Alciato – a witness to a lonely time – the poems 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.
- GenresPoetry
112 pages, Paperback
Published January 1, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
May 11, 2022
Read this on the plane to Cornwall this morning and what a momentous piece a gravity a root my annotations are very excited. One of those collections that could survive a dissertation.
I love this more please was surprised that it didn't exist on this website
I love this more please was surprised that it didn't exist on this website
May 23, 2023
EXTRAORDINARY, BUY ALL THE COPIES YOU CAN FIND, DEDICATE THE REMAINS OF YOUR YEAR TO IT !!!! to say it like a food critic, this is one of the best things i've tasted in a while.
in AWE of lucy's technical skill; the bar of what i consider 'finesse' has just been raised. not only do the individual words and each line on their own hit home but lucy's poems work as WHOLES in remarkable ways - barely ever witnessed to this extent that poems are (very Gestaltist) more than the sum of their lines. what many contemporary poets attempt (semi-well) with 'edgy' or 'unexpected' words and descriptions, she slays and walks over their bodies.
yes, i cried, though some were tears of poetry bliss.
extremely excited about the image-language relations here especially because made explicit there is a self-awareness of the collection reflecting in itself that is mesmerising. will have much more useful things to say in a few re-reads but so far, just sending a THANK YOU SO MUCH, LUCY, YOU TURNED MY WORLD AROUND into the internet.
in AWE of lucy's technical skill; the bar of what i consider 'finesse' has just been raised. not only do the individual words and each line on their own hit home but lucy's poems work as WHOLES in remarkable ways - barely ever witnessed to this extent that poems are (very Gestaltist) more than the sum of their lines. what many contemporary poets attempt (semi-well) with 'edgy' or 'unexpected' words and descriptions, she slays and walks over their bodies.
yes, i cried, though some were tears of poetry bliss.
extremely excited about the image-language relations here especially because made explicit there is a self-awareness of the collection reflecting in itself that is mesmerising. will have much more useful things to say in a few re-reads but so far, just sending a THANK YOU SO MUCH, LUCY, YOU TURNED MY WORLD AROUND into the internet.
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December 14, 2022YES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! thank you so much cas!!! :)
January 3, 2024
An excellent Christmas present and perfect for getting me back into poetry again 💖 really into the exploration of the relationship between image and text and how this is used as a metaphor for other things, really deeping the mind as 'the body's idea of itself' goodness
January 22, 2024
Somewhat obscure but intriguing and inventive poems.
October 22, 2024
So what if Mercer didn’t bowl my socks off with this whole collection, her language is elegant and musical. She still wrote:
“O carpenters, like the window against the wind,
the language of hands is indifferent to resistance.”
And I think that’s beautiful.
“O carpenters, like the window against the wind,
the language of hands is indifferent to resistance.”
And I think that’s beautiful.
September 25, 2022
Getting increasingly tired in my old age of conceits like this one, where every poem is in the form of a forgotten format: the emblem, a hybrid form of text and image. It's forgotten for a reason.
This feels like a hook on which to hang some pretty unexciting poems and bring glamour to their pretty banal subject matter. And now we're all fascinated by this rediscovered form? It doesn't even hold one's interest as a form as far as the end of the book.
One has the sense (again) of the British poetry community going up its own arse, and in a rut waiting for rejuvenation and renewed relevance. Which it won't find in poet-to-poet obscurantist dialogue like this.
This feels like a hook on which to hang some pretty unexciting poems and bring glamour to their pretty banal subject matter. And now we're all fascinated by this rediscovered form? It doesn't even hold one's interest as a form as far as the end of the book.
One has the sense (again) of the British poetry community going up its own arse, and in a rut waiting for rejuvenation and renewed relevance. Which it won't find in poet-to-poet obscurantist dialogue like this.
June 4, 2023
2.5 stars
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April 10, 2025<3
July 30, 2023
Mirror (p33)
I go deep into my instincts
But domestication pulls me back
Like the way the wind takes a line
Takes these wet t-shirts against itself -
Not that I feel it, the wind,
I just see it, like everything else
***
from 'Emblematic, CCXXII' (p85)
Obscurity
Poetry: she moves like ivy
every word re-encoding itself even after
the hostile earth dry as paper
becomes uncontrollable ivy
I go deep into my instincts
But domestication pulls me back
Like the way the wind takes a line
Takes these wet t-shirts against itself -
Not that I feel it, the wind,
I just see it, like everything else
***
from 'Emblematic, CCXXII' (p85)
Obscurity
Poetry: she moves like ivy
every word re-encoding itself even after
the hostile earth dry as paper
becomes uncontrollable ivy
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews