“Une ample poésie, tissée de mille voix” : La mélodie mnésique des objets dans la poésie de Lotte Kramer

Abstract

Born in 1923 in Mainz, Lotte Kramer, of German-Jewish origin, came to England with the Kindertransport at the beginning of the Second World War. She is the author of several collections of poems in English, the only language she has ever used as a writer. While her poems give free play to the painful echoes of exile, they are also a vivid tribute to people and places, to the emotional power of arts and objects. Her poetry could be defined as a series of verbal outbursts gradually breaking through the silence of an individual, familial and collective story while bringing to light various episodes of existential disruption and reconstruction. Objects play a significant part in this dual process, being woven into the fabric of the poems as remnants of a past that needs to be deciphered or details of a daily life that paves the way for further investigation. The present article examines the various occurrences of these objects and questions their poetic scope.