Poet Sandra Marchetti displays the diorama of life.
One of my most vivid memories of the toys of childhood, other than my official Davy Crockett coonskin hat, was the ViewMaster ™. I spent countless hours advancing the scenes of stories, foreign places, movies, science topics, and many other subjects, with those small windows on a circular cardboard reel. And, yes, the ViewMaster ™ is still around and available on Amazon and in toy stores.
Officially, those scenes on the reels were “dioramas,” but I always believed dioramas were something else entirely – recreated scenes, usually historical or from nature, that you could see at museums like the Louisiana State Exhibit Museum in Shreveport. The museum as close to my grandmother’s house, and the two of us often went when I visited. It was my first view of agriculture up close.
As it turns out, the definition of diorama is broad enough to include both my childhood toy and the museum exhibits. Says the Merriam-Webster dictionary: “a scenic representation in which a partly translucent painting is seen through a distance through an opening; a scenic representation in which sculpted figures are displayed, usually in miniature.” A diorama can also be a life-size exhibit.
In Diorama: Poems, poet Sandra Marchetti doesn’t talk about childhood memories of toys or museum visits. But the aptly named poetry collection functions as its own diorama, allowing you to peer through a poem to view subjects displayed in scenic ways, or to allow you to walk through a life-size representation of a subject. And she does it by using profoundly vivid language.
The subjects of her poems include what you would call normal things – walking a trail, watching dragonflies, feeling uneasy on a beautiful day, a night drive, finding a feather, observing the mountains, observing a sunset. But Marchetti then turns them into a diorama – a recreated scene, or clicking through your round, cardboard slide, each poem becoming a specific vision or display.
Semblance
Easter’s pale pink, green, lilac, blue:
I mute you. I will not sing across
hay-thatched grass as the songbirds do.
I see in the hue of a winter not yet
gone. The sun slips from stripped
trees and between the irises
Glück does not remember
the daffodils, gentle in their clusters,
clutching at the yellows of their throats.
A couple playing catch slides
from view; still the diorama
assembles, the scene runs true.
She continues with what become visual stories of family, domesticity, childhood memories, examining a leaf during a storm, an almost empty library, a birthday vacation where she touches water “the color of Windex,” and, a particular favorite, a poem called “Evensong,” in which she watches the neighbors as they wait the coming od f darkness to light sparklers and fireworks.
Sandra Marchetti
Marchetti previously published two poetry collections, Aisle 228 and Confluence, and four chapbooks of poems and lyric essays. Her poetry has been published in numerous literary journals and magazines, including The Rumpus, Pleaides, Mid-American Review, Barrelhouse, and Whiskey Island. In 2023, she won the Twin Bill Book Award for Best Baseball Poetry Book of the Year, and she is the Poetry Editor Emerita at River Styx Magazine. She received an MFA degree from George Mason University and currently serves as the assistant Director of Academic Support at Harper College in suburban Chicago.
Dust off your ViewMaster™. Visit the museum with its recreated life scenes. Or, more simply, read Marchetti’s Diorama, a scenic wonderland of sharp and intense color. It will be a remarkable visit.
Photo by Bernard Spragg, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young.
How to Read a Poem uses images like the mouse, the hive, the switch (from the Billy Collins poem)—to guide readers into new ways of understanding poems. Anthology included.
“I require all our incoming poetry students—in the MFA I direct—to buy and read this book.”
—Jeanetta Calhoun Mish
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