21 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Fleeting permanence, July 20, 2006
This review is from: Late Wife: Poems (Southern Messenger Poets) (Paperback)
I've only read this book once, which isn't really enough for most poetry - or for these poems - but the fleeting impression of something deeply wrong, something radiantly right, something lost but always retained leads me to write about it now. This book haunts you the way an old love affair, a failed marriage, or a missed opportunity lingers in your mind after the second cup of coffee. I read these poems in a parking lot waiting for someone to return, in an airport waiting for a loved one to arrive, and in bed when I couldn't fall asleep. Claudia Emerson was there with me - or actually it felt like she had been there before and I heard her echo, felt her departed presence. The language of the poems felt intentional, concrete, full of meaning and suggestion. The poems tingle, poised between death and renewal, loss and discovery, and that owes something to the language. I haven't lived with them long enough to know how they work, but this is a group of poems worth the time.
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16 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Wow-- an incredible book, May 30, 2006
This review is from: Late Wife: Poems (Southern Messenger Poets) (Paperback)
Timeless poems that reveal, through domestic detail, the complexities of the heart. I am so glad this book won the pulitzer. Deeply heartfelt, yet complicated and brave enough to resist declining into the sentimental. I can think of no recent book that writes of the shadowy emotions of loss and hope as this.
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7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Needs a second readthrough..., August 6, 2006
This review is from: Late Wife: Poems (Southern Messenger Poets) (Paperback)
This is the first Clauidia Emerson book I've read and it makes me want to read her others. I have to admit though, that on my first reading, I thought, "Big whoop." But after sitting and really digesting it, it started to win me over. She has the great poetic ability to capture, with candid detail, those rare emotional moments we have in life, like: divorce, death, lost love, fear of being lonely, etc.
There's no questioning her poetic skill. She uses all the tools and uses them well. But I think what turned me off initially was her ryhme scheme and use of white space. Sometimes her ryhming is too thick and noticeable, which gets in the way of what she is trying to convey. Also, many of her poems are long and structured using tercets (3 line stanzas). After reading five or six poems that look the same, you begin to grow weary and lose interest. Other than those considerations, "Late Wife" is an excellent collection. I am looking forward to her next piece of work.
Favorite poems and quotes from "Late Wife":
1. The Autobon Collection- "There will always be/such things I regret knowing."
2. House-Sitting- "Evenings/I lit candles as though for guests/and danced with my own vanishing/as the prisms moved in the draft/my body made of the stillness."
3. Rent- "But I imagine the walls still disappear inside/themselves, vacant forms, and the house grows/lighter, a deceitful ruin that lingers, rising//longer than it should above you and the fertile/hunger that will, with enough time, consume it-/before going on to another survival."
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