Diorama
by Sandy Marchetti
(Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2025) Reviewed by Joe Roberts
In Sandra Marchetti’s third poetry collection, Diorama, she pulls inspiration from the natural world, visual art, and the work of other poets to craft florid poems that are both elegiac and life-affirming. The subject matter of Diorama is diverse, with some poems focusing on animals, others discussing delicious food, and a few gracefully wallowing in plain, old human longing. And while this might seem an eclectic smattering of themes, that’s largely the point; the collection is a world in miniature, a comprehensive diorama of the many joys and sorrows of living. Marchetti masterfully ties these disparate elements together into a cohesive tableau through her consistent voice, dexterous rhymes, and vivid imagery.
The book’s opening poem, “Shadow,” aptly introduces Marchetti’s technical skill as well as her ability to find beauty in nature, even when that beauty comes with an implicit threat. In the poem’s initial handful of rhymed couplets, we find the narrator out in the woods discovering mushrooms, appreciating the trilling of goldfinches, and reading a sign that states, “Foxes are opportunistic feeders.” So far, so pleasant. But in the second half of this piece, the narrator realizes a fox is watching her, perhaps assessing if it could eat her. As this revelation dawns, the rhymes slip and enjamb, cropping up in unexpected places. The effect is a musical disorientation which mirrors the speaker’s exhilaration at this encounter. “Shadow” then ends abruptly with these foreboding lines: "Hidden to your scruff in the gathering / dusk, I hold and release your stare, // that of a silver-eyed murderer / who smells breath in the air."
Many of the poems in Diorama are similar to this opener in both tone and craft. The collection does more than just revel in the threatening grandeur of the wilderness, though. It also enters into conversation with the poetic tradition as Marchetti draws on material from many other poets, such as Anne Sexton, Octavio Paz, and Li-Young Lee. Her dazzling “Refrain” even adopts the rhythm of an old Anglican hymn.
In fact, it wouldn’t be wholly inaccurate to call Diorama a collage of extant work, at least in part, since Marchetti incorporates outside influences throughout all three sections of the book. It should also be mentioned that the dedication for Diorama reads, “for all of the artists I stole from, and for my husband,” and the book has a lengthy list of endnotes crediting all the poetry and artistic works from which Marchetti borrows lines, imagery, and rhythms.
Of all the poets (other than Marchetti) who haunt Diorama’s pages, though, none features so often or prominently as Louise Glück, the one-time poet laureate of the United States. To start with, Diorama takes its epigraph, “At the end of my suffering / there was a door,” from Glück’s “The Wild Iris,” a metaphysical poem in which an iris speaks to humanity about the renewal which follows death.
In addition to this epigraph, there are many times throughout Diorama when Marchetti alludes to Glück directly. For example, in the poem “Semblance”:
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.
It’s also worth noting that this is the first and only time Marchetti uses the word “diorama” within the book. This gives “Semblance” almost the same weight as a titular poem, and it lends special gravity to Glück’s presence therein.
But perhaps the boldest of Marchetti’s references to Glück is found within her poem “The Door,” which appears fairly late in the book. Here, Marchetti inverts Glück’s line which she chose for the epigraph, stating, "I want to say, / this is the end // of happiness. Will / I accept love?"
This is a clever and all-too-human response to the narrator’s acceptance of endings in “The Wild Iris” and its eponymous collection. While it might be a comfort to believe that some vegetal rejuvenation comes after the suffering of life, as Glück’s narrator claims, when you actually find yourself at that threshold, it’s difficult to see the end as anything but a loss.
The resignation of Glück’s narrator throughout The Wild Iris requires a surrender of what you are so you might become something else, but Marchetti wants to go on embracing her humanity, even when it comes with sorrow. Several of the poems in Diorama, such as “Ebb Tide” and “Depth of Field,” affirm as much.
Through its loving encapsulation of life’s varied delightful aspects, Diorama stands as a respectful rebuttal to The Wild Iris’ insistence that death is merely the end of suffering. Death, Marchetti contends, is also the end of every knowable happiness.
Marchetti’s ardor for existence also manifests in a key technical difference between her and Glück; Marchetti uses rhyme playfully and with abandon, as I’ve noted, whereas Glück almost always apportioned rhyme with a teaspoon. For instance, while Glück wrote no shortage of poems on the subject of longing, it's impossible to imagine her crafting something so pleasantly rhymed and unabashedly sentimental as these lines from Marchetti’s “All that I can tell from here”:
A map notes you and I
span 3,000 miles,
pin to pin; farther
we have never been.
A valley unclasps
beyond my hands.
I anchor my skin
above the rocks and slide
in the cooled blue,
an ache away from you.
The unveiled pathos of this piece, as well as Marchetti’s evident zest for the poem as a sonic artifact, starkly contrasts with Glück’s austere, analytical style.
Despite her fervor for life, though, Marchetti also expounds on impermanence fairly often. Poems such as “Refrain” are stunning presentations of death, transformation, and what gets left behind. This theme is most apparent in what I would call the collection’s crowning jewel, “Triptych,” in which Marchetti imparts these somber lines:
All things
are migratory—
leaves on trees,
feathers molting.
The geese cannot
live in their coats
much longer…
Their necks wander on
toward dusk, toward
time, the endless
crest of the preserve.
Yes, Marchetti is in love with the world and her place in it, and she loses herself in that love through poems like “Of Late,” “County Donuts,” and “Witness.” However, the most beautiful images she can summon are so often tinged with their own ephemerality, as they are in “Triptych.” No matter how much we may love our lives, Glück’s door is one we cannot help but step through, which Marchetti acknowledges through her depiction of the present moment as naught but a transitory preserve.
Marchetti drives this point home in the collection’s final poem, “A Swim at Europe Bay Beach in July, Deserted,” which borrows imagery from Anne Sexton’s “Nude Swim.” At the end of this borderline desolate poem, Marchetti writes:
I am convinced now that more
than anything what we want
is to live forever. No one can
see us, smashed as sea glass, open—
the ants eating our cherries
at the shoreline.
These concluding lines perfectly encapsulate the overarching tension of Diorama; nothing lasts forever, not even the most beautiful things, and so we suffer. Nevertheless, the ephemeral joys to be found in nature, art, and our relationships with other people make us long for eternal life, even if we recognize that such a life would be plagued with the unremitting agony of loss.
The book’s opening poem, “Shadow,” aptly introduces Marchetti’s technical skill as well as her ability to find beauty in nature, even when that beauty comes with an implicit threat. In the poem’s initial handful of rhymed couplets, we find the narrator out in the woods discovering mushrooms, appreciating the trilling of goldfinches, and reading a sign that states, “Foxes are opportunistic feeders.” So far, so pleasant. But in the second half of this piece, the narrator realizes a fox is watching her, perhaps assessing if it could eat her. As this revelation dawns, the rhymes slip and enjamb, cropping up in unexpected places. The effect is a musical disorientation which mirrors the speaker’s exhilaration at this encounter. “Shadow” then ends abruptly with these foreboding lines: "Hidden to your scruff in the gathering / dusk, I hold and release your stare, // that of a silver-eyed murderer / who smells breath in the air."
Many of the poems in Diorama are similar to this opener in both tone and craft. The collection does more than just revel in the threatening grandeur of the wilderness, though. It also enters into conversation with the poetic tradition as Marchetti draws on material from many other poets, such as Anne Sexton, Octavio Paz, and Li-Young Lee. Her dazzling “Refrain” even adopts the rhythm of an old Anglican hymn.
In fact, it wouldn’t be wholly inaccurate to call Diorama a collage of extant work, at least in part, since Marchetti incorporates outside influences throughout all three sections of the book. It should also be mentioned that the dedication for Diorama reads, “for all of the artists I stole from, and for my husband,” and the book has a lengthy list of endnotes crediting all the poetry and artistic works from which Marchetti borrows lines, imagery, and rhythms.
Of all the poets (other than Marchetti) who haunt Diorama’s pages, though, none features so often or prominently as Louise Glück, the one-time poet laureate of the United States. To start with, Diorama takes its epigraph, “At the end of my suffering / there was a door,” from Glück’s “The Wild Iris,” a metaphysical poem in which an iris speaks to humanity about the renewal which follows death.
In addition to this epigraph, there are many times throughout Diorama when Marchetti alludes to Glück directly. For example, in the poem “Semblance”:
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.
It’s also worth noting that this is the first and only time Marchetti uses the word “diorama” within the book. This gives “Semblance” almost the same weight as a titular poem, and it lends special gravity to Glück’s presence therein.
But perhaps the boldest of Marchetti’s references to Glück is found within her poem “The Door,” which appears fairly late in the book. Here, Marchetti inverts Glück’s line which she chose for the epigraph, stating, "I want to say, / this is the end // of happiness. Will / I accept love?"
This is a clever and all-too-human response to the narrator’s acceptance of endings in “The Wild Iris” and its eponymous collection. While it might be a comfort to believe that some vegetal rejuvenation comes after the suffering of life, as Glück’s narrator claims, when you actually find yourself at that threshold, it’s difficult to see the end as anything but a loss.
The resignation of Glück’s narrator throughout The Wild Iris requires a surrender of what you are so you might become something else, but Marchetti wants to go on embracing her humanity, even when it comes with sorrow. Several of the poems in Diorama, such as “Ebb Tide” and “Depth of Field,” affirm as much.
Through its loving encapsulation of life’s varied delightful aspects, Diorama stands as a respectful rebuttal to The Wild Iris’ insistence that death is merely the end of suffering. Death, Marchetti contends, is also the end of every knowable happiness.
Marchetti’s ardor for existence also manifests in a key technical difference between her and Glück; Marchetti uses rhyme playfully and with abandon, as I’ve noted, whereas Glück almost always apportioned rhyme with a teaspoon. For instance, while Glück wrote no shortage of poems on the subject of longing, it's impossible to imagine her crafting something so pleasantly rhymed and unabashedly sentimental as these lines from Marchetti’s “All that I can tell from here”:
A map notes you and I
span 3,000 miles,
pin to pin; farther
we have never been.
A valley unclasps
beyond my hands.
I anchor my skin
above the rocks and slide
in the cooled blue,
an ache away from you.
The unveiled pathos of this piece, as well as Marchetti’s evident zest for the poem as a sonic artifact, starkly contrasts with Glück’s austere, analytical style.
Despite her fervor for life, though, Marchetti also expounds on impermanence fairly often. Poems such as “Refrain” are stunning presentations of death, transformation, and what gets left behind. This theme is most apparent in what I would call the collection’s crowning jewel, “Triptych,” in which Marchetti imparts these somber lines:
All things
are migratory—
leaves on trees,
feathers molting.
The geese cannot
live in their coats
much longer…
Their necks wander on
toward dusk, toward
time, the endless
crest of the preserve.
Yes, Marchetti is in love with the world and her place in it, and she loses herself in that love through poems like “Of Late,” “County Donuts,” and “Witness.” However, the most beautiful images she can summon are so often tinged with their own ephemerality, as they are in “Triptych.” No matter how much we may love our lives, Glück’s door is one we cannot help but step through, which Marchetti acknowledges through her depiction of the present moment as naught but a transitory preserve.
Marchetti drives this point home in the collection’s final poem, “A Swim at Europe Bay Beach in July, Deserted,” which borrows imagery from Anne Sexton’s “Nude Swim.” At the end of this borderline desolate poem, Marchetti writes:
I am convinced now that more
than anything what we want
is to live forever. No one can
see us, smashed as sea glass, open—
the ants eating our cherries
at the shoreline.
These concluding lines perfectly encapsulate the overarching tension of Diorama; nothing lasts forever, not even the most beautiful things, and so we suffer. Nevertheless, the ephemeral joys to be found in nature, art, and our relationships with other people make us long for eternal life, even if we recognize that such a life would be plagued with the unremitting agony of loss.
Joe Roberts is a Salt Lake City poet. In his debut chapbook, Anathema, he speaks from the confluence between sacredness and profanity to find redeeming beauty in a world that can so often feel cursed. Anathema was published by Moon in the Rye Press in 2024, and Joe’s poetry has also appeared in Arlington Literary Journal, Juste Milieu Zine, and the Moonstone Arts Center’s 2024 anthology on human rights. With his free time, Joe writes for SLUG Magazine, takes communion at local coffee shops, and hikes the Wasatch Front with his partner, Brooke.
