Turning Back: The Poetry of Claire Malroux

Daybreak: New and Selected Poems, Claire Malroux (NYRB Poets, 2020), £13.99

To read Claire Malroux’s Daybreak: New and Selected Poems, translated from the Marilyn Hacker, is to wander contentedly around an art-filled museum for the day. Imagine seeing Matisse’s Intérieur aux aubergines, its blue-flowered wallpaper and wavering red tablecloth next to the phosphorescent-green dining-room doorways of Wassily Kandinsky’s Interieur (Mein Esszimmer) and Harriet Backer’s glowing studio, Mitt atelier. Down a quick corridor and into another gallery: Monet’s poppy-filled Coquelicots; Sonia Delaunay’s abstract sunrise in Simultaneous Contrasts; Gabriele Münter’s bright-yellow house, Stillleben vor dem gelben Haus, behind a still life of oranges and pink begonias.

Let’s walk into another room – I mean, poem – this time by Malroux:

The entryway blazes
buttercup-yellow bamboo furniture
radiant on stiff, spindly legs
garnished with even brighter flowered cushions
or ones whose fluid egg-yolk satin
bursts from beneath the crust
of dun-coloured crochet-work
images of the sun

Next to this:

but beyond that entry opens out
the twilit dining room, smoke-hued curtains
on a wooden rod, a hanging fixture with three tulip globes
dappled blue…

And then this:

Huge purple flowers spring from black corollas
We hardly ever go into that room
whose north window looks out on the road

Malroux’s poems are as bright as paintings. Not only picturesque but ekphrastic in the Ancient Greek sense of the word: vivid descriptions that bring the subject right before the reader’s ...