Product Description
Geologists and archaeologists use spirit level tools to locate elusive horizontal levels in ground or rock. Similarly, the poems in Spirit Level search for the tenuous points of balance between memory and lived terrain – between past and present lives, between grief and moments of enlightenment. Conscious of the constructed and fragmentary nature of remembering, this poetry forges connecting threads between how we live in the now, and how we create meaning from past histories and experience.
‘In poems that are crisp, tangible and haunting, Marcelle Freiman ranges across family history, migration, childhood discovery, bodily resonances and loss. This sensuous and moving book is attentive to the clarity of memory alongside the shimmer of dislocation. A captivating work of presences and absences to be savoured on many levels.’
Jill Jones
Dominic Symes reviews Spirit Level in TEXT
REVIEWS
“Spirit Level: the balance between two worlds, two lives, between memory and the lived past…deceptively anecdotal poems where the scenario is allowed to speak for itself, the underlying dislocations lending irony to the the child-onlooker’s slowly growing awareness of them…The sense of alienation, estrangement of the immigrant and uprooted persona, is most poignantly expressed.”
MARGARET BRADSTOCK, Rochford Street Review
“Marcelle Freiman’s collection poems Spirit Level, her third book, surely deserves Jill Jones’ endorsement as a book where ‘clarity of memory [sits] alongside a shimmer of location’, whose ‘presences and absences’ are to be savoured…Without being didactic the poems provide a rich recollection of Freiman’s South Africa and its contradictions, its beauty and ugliness…Freiman’s poems are like the plants and people she most admires for their toughness, a toughness likened to drought-resistant trees and plants in the veldt, to the spirit of old mining towns (despite their role in colonialism), and to the black South Africans who looked after her as a child and whom her father helped during the Anti-Apartheid struggle.”
ADAM AITKEN, Mascara Review
“Freiman is a more complex poet than simply a purveyor of migration memories and her work is especially concerned with the visual arts, the poems often responding to, or taking as a starting point, paintings, especially contemporary Australian paintings.”
MARTIN DUWELL, Australian Poetry Review
