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In Late Wife, a woman explores her disappearance from one life and reappearance in another as she addresses her former husband, herself, and her new husband in a series of epistolary poems. Though not satisfied in her first marriage, she laments vanishing from the life she and her husband shared for years. She then describes the unexpected joys of solitude during her recovery and emotional convalescence. Finally, in a sequence of sonnets, she speaks to her new husband, whose first wife died from lung cancer. The poems highlight how rebeginning in this relationship has come about in part because of two couples’ respective losses. The most personal of Claudia Emerson’s poetry collections, Late Wife is both an elegy and a celebration of a rich present informed by a complex past.
In this eloquent long poem, Claudia Emerson employs the voices of two family members on a small southern farm to examine the universal complexities of place, generation, memory, and identity. Alternating between the voices of Preacher and Sister, Pinion is narrated by the younger, surviving sister, Rose, in whose memory the now-gone family and farm vividly live on: “In the dream that recurs, like a bird returning, the place is still as it was—as though they went away, years ago, fully intending to be back by first dark.” Sister tells of her observances in day-to-day life in the 1920s and her struggle to take care of her father, grown brothers, and Rose—“the change-of-life baby”...
Daringly realistic and artfully mediated by past and present, Claudia Emerson's Secure the Shadow contains historical pieces as well as poems centering on the deaths of the poet's brother and father. Emerson covers all aspects of the tragedies that, as Keats believed, contribute to our human collective of Soul-making, in which each death accrues into an immortal web of ongoing love and meaning for the living. Emerson's unwavering gaze shows that loss cannot be eluded, but can be embraced in elegies as devastating as they are beautiful. The macabre title poem refers to the old custom of making daguerreotypes, primitive photographs, of deceased loved ones. Other striking poems describe animal ...
Winner of the 2010 Autumn House Poetry Contest, selected by Claudia Emerson. In her fifth collection of poetry, Hales mines the layers of grief and discovers how to surive in a broken world.
Poet Claudia Emerson begins Figure Studies with a twenty-five-poem lyric sequence called "All Girls School," offering intricate views of a richly imagined boarding school for girls. Whether focused on a lesson, a teacher, or the girls themselves as they collectively "school" -- or refuse to -- the poems explore ways girls are "trained" in the broadest sense of the word."Gossips," the second section, is a shorter sequence narrated by women as they talk about other women in a variety of isolations; these poems, told from the outside looking in, highlight a speculative voicing of all the gossips cannot know. In "Early Lessons," the third section, children narrate as they also observe similarly ...
In Claude before Time and Space, her final collection, Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Claudia Emerson quietly but fiercely explores the themes of mortality and time. In the first section of this book, “The Wheel,” Emerson uses a rural southern setting in poems that reflect on memory, the self, and relationships. In section two, “Bird Ephemera,” she explores historical figures—from an early naturalist and writer who raised her children in poverty to a small-town doctor. The collection concludes with a series of poems named after the poet’s father. This illuminating body of work displays a master poet at the height of her craft.
Poets, teachers, and musicologists fusing studies of form, scansion, and musical creation to redefine the place of the American bard
Claudia Emerson published six poetry collections with LSU Press, including Late Wife, Secure the Shadow, and The Opposite House. A professor of English and member of the creative writing faculty at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Emerson served as the poet laureate of Virginia and won numerous awards for teaching and writing—including the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry—before her death in 2014. This posthumous volume of poetry from Pulitzer Prize winner Claudia Emerson explores the suspended state of existence that illness imposes upon its sufferers—what she calls the “impossible bottle.” With a strong will and a self-deprecating awareness of the instinct to seek mean...
The poetry of Claudia Emerson is marked by a precise, evocative handling of subjects drawn from her upbringing in the rural South yet recognizable to readers across cultures: complicated family histories, the eccentricities of place, the frustrations of illness, the pleasures of language and environment. Speakers drawn from history and local settings recount narratives of loss, struggle, and perseverance. The natural world glistens with beauty and vitality. Cancer overtakes the body, producing a suspended state of existence. Everyday objects suggest universal truths and mysteries. Ungrafted offers more than two dozen previously uncollected poems left in manuscript at the time of Emerson’s death, alongside generous selections from all her previous books. Assembled by her longtime editor Dave Smith, Ungrafted adds a final volume to the legacy of the writer described by the Richmond Times-Dispatch as “one of the most honored, decorated, and revered poets in Virginia history.”
Budy's anthology compiles work from some of the United States' most talented female poets, exploring a wide variety of themes and tones ranging from the darkly passionate to the humorous.