Review by Jami Macarty
Sandra Marchetti’s baseball poetry from Aisle 228 (Texas A&M University Press, 2023), “slides / from view” as her third collection, Diorama, “assembles.” Across three sections, Diorama features occasion-driven poems dedicated to loved ones, poetic influences, and the natural world.
Marchetti’s poems skillfully incorporate both overt and subtle metrics, end rhyme, alliteration, and assonance. Most of her poems are short, seldom exceeding a single page, and feature concise lines that are broken for sonic or semantic effect. Primarily observational, the poems use imagery as the foundational element to “hold and release” the reader’s attention.
The poet seems more focused on capturing specific moments and freezing them in time than existing within their flow. Sometimes, this snapshot-capturing approach, combined with the poet’s frequent use of the indicative mood, weakens the poems’ potential for deeper resonance and emotional connection with the reader.
As they accumulate, the subject-object observations create a layered remove within the poems, leaving the reader unsure of how the speaker feels about this distance. This ambiguity may hint at ambivalence. At the very least, it indicates that the poet is willing to describe the experience of distance, but not necessarily attempt to bridge it within herself, her environment, or the relationships represented in the poems. This creates a fascinating “lucid unease” and unsettling effect.
But then in poems such as “Feather,” “Witness,” and “All that I can tell from here,” Marchetti immerses the reader in a multi-sensory experience, evoking emotions through the symbolism of a feather “off the wing,” the “inevitable / disappearance” of a snake, and pins on a map that show “you and I / span 3,000 miles.” Here, the power of Marchetti’s well-executed and felt description “fades… this distance” between poet and the objects of her observation or desire. By the last poem, “A Swim at Europe Bay Beach in July, Deserted,” even though “the ants [are] eating our cherries / at the shoreline,” we are swimming together — language, observation, feeling, and humanity tuned in poetic balance.
Diorama by Sandra Marchetti. Stephen F. Austin University Press, May 2025.
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award.
