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The Disappearing Room
by Mara Bergman
In Mara Bergman's first full collection, the poet travels from the tenements of New York City to the Sussex countryside, from childhood to motherhood, and beyond. Through a wide range of subjects – steelworkers and young apprentices, photographs and photograms, dolls in a local museum's hidden collection – she writes with a keen sense of time and place. These are probing poems, seeking to discover; poems with a sense of urgency. Here are poems about love, loss, friendship, family, fitting in and, ultimately, acceptance. They are infused with wonder and provide a fresh way of looking at the world.
Mara Bergman's poetic voice is a subtle one, based on the rhythms of ordinary speech, and has an admirably natural or even casual feel that can be deceptive. The developments are hard to predict, the endings open, the writing itself completely free of affectation. There is a genuine search going on here — both poetic and personal. Mara's work captures the vividness of the small detail and makes it resonant, taking it out into the wider world.
These are fluent, communicative, unselfconscious poems, yet they display great emotional tact. Mara Bergman knows instinctively what to include and what to leave out. Her poems, with their American inflection, hold a mirror to here and there, to people, places, incidents and to the human heart. This collection has been a long time in the making and now, to have the poems gathered together, many of them already with the feel of classics, is a delight.
Hbk 978-1-911469-35-3
Pbk 978-1-911469-34-6
Ebook 978-1-911469-36-0
92 pages
Published July 2018
