Poetry
Figured Image
By Anne-Marie Albiach
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
The Post-Apollo Press is honored to release Figured Image, a new collection of poetry by Anne-Marie Albiach. Since the publication of État 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.
Translated works by Anne-Marie Albiach include Mezza Voce (The Post-Apollo Press, 1988), État (Awede, 1989), "Vocative Figure"(Allardyce Books, 1992), A Geometry (Burning Deck, 1998), A Discursive Space: Interviews with Jean Daive (Duration Press, 1999), and Two Poems: Flammigere & the Line ... the Loss (Shearsman Books, 2004). EXCÈS: cette mesure first appeared as a collaboration with Richard Tuttle. It was published by Yvon Lambert, Paris, in 2002.
Keith Waldrop is the author of eighteen books of poetry including The Real Subject: Queries and Conjectures of Jacob Delafon... with Sample Poems (Omnidawn, 2004) and The House Seen from Nowhere (Litmus Press, 2003). He co-edits Burning Deck press with Rosmarie Waldrop. His translations of contemporary French poetry have been supported by two NEA fellowships and the government of France has awarded him the rank of Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres.
October 2006 94 pages $18.00
ISBN: 978-0-942996-59-3
