Figured Image

Poetry. Translated from the French by Keith Waldrop. FIGURED IMAGE is a striking new collection of poetry by Anne-Marie Albiach. Since the publication of Etat by Mercure de France in 1971, Albiach has remained a signal presence in French poetry and beyond, impacting American poets and artists such as Barbara Guest and Richard Tuttle. Bound by a geometry where language and body converge, FIGURED IMAGE offers a lyricism that "breathes differently," luring the reader down darkening roads of memory, desire, and chance. "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.