During the late Renaissance, the Italian scholar and jurist Andrea Alciato began writing what is now commonly accepted as the first ‘emblem book’. Emblematum liber (originally released in 1531 with woodcuts by the German publisher and illustrator Heinrich Steiner) comprised a series of poems framed with a kind of ‘decorative inlay’, ‘inserted’ illustrations, and mottos. In these innovative leaves, image and text came together in a kind of interrelated mimesis, in the process inventing the emblem publication as a whole new cultural genre, widely popularised as a ‘humanist pastime’ across Europe.

It feels as counterintuitive to introduce a book review with such specific social and historical context as it does to imbue the reading process with the events of a poet’s life – the beauty of poetry existing, implicitly, as an unrestricted, liberal space, vehemently open to interpretation. However, it is in this precise milieu that Lucy Mercer’s debut collection, Emblem, exists, intentionally creating a dialogue between past and present, creator and creation, publication and interpretation. In her preface, Mercer states that she came across Alciato’s book whilst pregnant with her son. The emblems’ constructed worlds – and their layered abstraction – perhaps mimicked the ways her own body was becoming a hybrid framework, one body ‘inserted’ within another. Context is placed centre stage throughout the collection, as when the speaker states: ‘I am here / in the poem too its rings of rock so carefully / winding through one another.’ (‘Phantasias’)

Here, emblems, like pregnant bodies, are filled with duplicities: messages within messages, lives within lives like Matryoshka dolls: ...