Description
Emblem is the debut collection from Lucy Mercer, winner of the inaugural White Review Poet's Prize. This is a book of ecological poetics, interested in exploring the changing symbols of the natural world in literature. 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.
Emblem is the Poetry Book Society Summer Choice
About the Author
Lucy Mercer's poems have been published widely in magazines and anthologies. She was awarded the inaugural White Review Poet's Prize. She recently completed a PhD where she developed a speculative theory of emblems. She teaches creative writing at Goldsmiths.
Awards
Winner of Poetry Book Society Choice 2022.
Book Information
ISBN 9781913513221
Author Lucy Mercer
Format Paperback
Imprint Prototype Publishing Ltd.
Publisher Prototype Publishing Ltd.
