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'Geologists and archaeologists use spirit level tools to find horizontal levels in ground or rock. Similarly, the poems in Spirit Level search for elusive balance points between memory and lived terrain, between past and present lives, between grief and enlightenment. They are connecting threads of lived and familial histories, often perceived through remembered or exigent visual portals.
'This is Marcelle Freiman’s third book of 37 new poems, a number of which have been published in well-known Australian literary journals. There are poems using longer forms or sequences, exploring the fragmented nature of human experience, making patterns and story from lives in the present or those which are lost. Other, shorter lyric forms articulate shards of memory and perception. Throughout the book, themes of loss seek a balance against moments of light.'
Source : publisher's blurb
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Works about this Work
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‘There Is a Stillness I Seek’ : On Ekphrasis and Memory
2023
single work
review
— Appears in: TEXT : The Journal of the Australian Association of Writing Programs , vol. 27 no. 1 2023;
— Review of Spirit Level 2021 selected work poetry 'Marcelle Freiman’s Spirit Level is a delicate balancing act, where positive tensions between the seen and the remembered are painted with expert brushstrokes, advancing the contemporary ekphrastic project from a different perspective; a productive, yet blurred, binary: the poet- academic.' (Introduction) -
Adam Aitken Reviews Spirit Level by Marcelle Freiman
2022
single work
review
— Appears in: Mascara Literary Review , no. 28 2022;
— Review of Spirit Level 2021 selected work poetry'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. As restless, dynamic, and ‘unsettled’ as her earlier two collections, White Lines and Monkey’s Wedding, (which I reviewed on its publication). This new collection is structured into two parts, the first contains many poems about memories: of childhood in South Africa, of Freiman’s student days as an anti-Apartheid activist, and of parents and Jewish relatives killed and dispersed by the Holocaust. The second part of the collection explores various subjects, with many poems with Australian locations and subjects, including a number of poems on art and photography. Together the poems provide a vivid picture of the life of a South African migrant now settled in Australia. The deeper theme is the poet’s engagement with the past, not so much as nostalgia, but about how her present sensibility is now ineluctably imbricated with these memories. The poems bring a sense of presence to memory and amplify memory’s affective power, because the affect is often tied to traumatic events.'(Introduction)
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Marcelle Freiman : Spirit Level; Peter Skrzynecki: Travelling Among the Stars
2022
single work
review
— Appears in: Australian Poetry Review , no. 17 2022;
— Review of Spirit Level 2021 selected work poetry ; Travelling Among the Stars 2022 selected work poetry 'It’s a fact well-known that the advances in medical science in the last half-century have enabled those who have access to them to live longer and healthier lives than those of previous generations. This seems all to the good but I wonder whether many have pondered the effect that this has had on creativity, on poetry specifically. Since poets are now likely to survive longer, how does this affect their own sense of the shape of their writing lives? (And for that matter, since critics survive longer too, how does that affect their engagement with “the literature of their times” since the “times” might well be getting towards three-quarters of a century.) I don’t think it’s simply a matter of what has always happened being mathematically extended (or distended). There may well be tangible changes that occur when poets get into their seventies assuming that the inner life continues to grow and change and the creative impetus survives. One of these changes might well relate to memories which, I think it could be argued, alter in quality, significance and insistence as writer approach the deeper recesses of age. Marcelle Freiman’s and Peter Skrzynecki’s recent books come from writers now in their seventies – late seventies in Skrzynecki’s case – and they are both very much books built on memories, exploring the fact that memories are far more complex things than the simple word suggests. When the life of the poet has also been marked early on by the experience of migration with its imposition of a double identity, memories have an extra edge although it could be argued that the memories of everyone who reaches their seventies are memories of a childhood so far in the past that it might just as well be “another country”. A past where, as Brook Emery says in a poem in his selected, “We used to eat Chiko Rolls, Sargents Pies, / Pluto Pups, Polly Waffles, Rainbow Balls . . .” could seem nearly as unfamiliar and exotic to a poet of the third decade of the twenty-first century as a foreign country of origin like South Africa.' (Introduction)
-
Marcelle Freiman : Spirit Level; Peter Skrzynecki: Travelling Among the Stars
2022
single work
review
— Appears in: Australian Poetry Review , no. 17 2022;
— Review of Spirit Level 2021 selected work poetry ; Travelling Among the Stars 2022 selected work poetry 'It’s a fact well-known that the advances in medical science in the last half-century have enabled those who have access to them to live longer and healthier lives than those of previous generations. This seems all to the good but I wonder whether many have pondered the effect that this has had on creativity, on poetry specifically. Since poets are now likely to survive longer, how does this affect their own sense of the shape of their writing lives? (And for that matter, since critics survive longer too, how does that affect their engagement with “the literature of their times” since the “times” might well be getting towards three-quarters of a century.) I don’t think it’s simply a matter of what has always happened being mathematically extended (or distended). There may well be tangible changes that occur when poets get into their seventies assuming that the inner life continues to grow and change and the creative impetus survives. One of these changes might well relate to memories which, I think it could be argued, alter in quality, significance and insistence as writer approach the deeper recesses of age. Marcelle Freiman’s and Peter Skrzynecki’s recent books come from writers now in their seventies – late seventies in Skrzynecki’s case – and they are both very much books built on memories, exploring the fact that memories are far more complex things than the simple word suggests. When the life of the poet has also been marked early on by the experience of migration with its imposition of a double identity, memories have an extra edge although it could be argued that the memories of everyone who reaches their seventies are memories of a childhood so far in the past that it might just as well be “another country”. A past where, as Brook Emery says in a poem in his selected, “We used to eat Chiko Rolls, Sargents Pies, / Pluto Pups, Polly Waffles, Rainbow Balls . . .” could seem nearly as unfamiliar and exotic to a poet of the third decade of the twenty-first century as a foreign country of origin like South Africa.' (Introduction) -
Adam Aitken Reviews Spirit Level by Marcelle Freiman
2022
single work
review
— Appears in: Mascara Literary Review , no. 28 2022;
— Review of Spirit Level 2021 selected work poetry'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. As restless, dynamic, and ‘unsettled’ as her earlier two collections, White Lines and Monkey’s Wedding, (which I reviewed on its publication). This new collection is structured into two parts, the first contains many poems about memories: of childhood in South Africa, of Freiman’s student days as an anti-Apartheid activist, and of parents and Jewish relatives killed and dispersed by the Holocaust. The second part of the collection explores various subjects, with many poems with Australian locations and subjects, including a number of poems on art and photography. Together the poems provide a vivid picture of the life of a South African migrant now settled in Australia. The deeper theme is the poet’s engagement with the past, not so much as nostalgia, but about how her present sensibility is now ineluctably imbricated with these memories. The poems bring a sense of presence to memory and amplify memory’s affective power, because the affect is often tied to traumatic events.'(Introduction)
-
‘There Is a Stillness I Seek’ : On Ekphrasis and Memory
2023
single work
review
— Appears in: TEXT : The Journal of the Australian Association of Writing Programs , vol. 27 no. 1 2023;
— Review of Spirit Level 2021 selected work poetry 'Marcelle Freiman’s Spirit Level is a delicate balancing act, where positive tensions between the seen and the remembered are painted with expert brushstrokes, advancing the contemporary ekphrastic project from a different perspective; a productive, yet blurred, binary: the poet- academic.' (Introduction)
