Customer Reviews

Late Wife: Poems (Southern Messenger Poets)

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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."

I almost exclusively read nonfiction, but saw this author on tv after winning a pulitzer. I decided to give it a try, and find her poetry to be very moving.

As I try to recreate my paper library into a Kindle one, I have to be honest with myself about which are the very best books in my library and worth the cost of buying twice. This work by Claudia Emerson is most definitely one of them. There are some books by modern writers/poets that deserve, and want, to be read again and again, and since the Kindle allows us to take our library with us wherever we go, it's nice to have these very best at our fingertips.

The formatting in this book was interesting--they worked hard to keep the physical form of the poem in place--to the point of adjusting fonts to different sizes on the same page. Are other Kindle owners seeing the same thing? It's not a problem; in fact, I think I prefer it.

I had to read this book for a graduate level poetry workshop and was quite simply blown away. What a fascinating premise Emerson has created. There were many poems I went back and re-read, marvelling at her word choice and craftsmanship of these poems. The collection is divided up into three parts and chronicles her relationship with a man whose former wife passed away. I would highly recommend this poetry collection for anyone who enjoys reading poetry. It is one of those rare books of poetry you want to read again and again.

Claudia Emerson, Late Wife (Louisiana State University Press, 2005)

I've had very little patience with review-writing for the past six weeks or so, and thus I let this review go unconscionably long (I finished the book on April 30th and am writing this on June 10th). Thus, I've forgotten most of the phrases I was turning over in my mind. I do know, however, they all involved heaping a great deal of praise on Late Wife, Claudia Emerson's most recent book and the winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. I often find myself wondering what the judges were thinking giving the prize to book X instead of book Y; not in this case. The details may be a little fuzzy in my head this far after the fact, but the book itself is pure gold, that much I remember. Emerson has a wonderful eye for detail and that all-too-rare quality in a poet of not letting the story get in the way of the description:

"I'd run that course/so many times I imagined myself/a goat encircling an invisible stake//of the baseball diamond's off-season/desolation, scoreboard blank before/the lightening sky." ("The Practice Cage")

That, right there, is some language, folks. This is a book you want to read. Likely to be on my ten best reads of the year list. **** ½

I read about this collection by Claudia Emerson on a list of recent Pulitzer winners, and its marital themes appealed to me, so I gave it a try. These poems seem deceptively simple upon first reading, but as I've reread and lingered over them, they have grown deep roots. There is indeed a lot going on under the surface here.

The first two sections of this slim volume offer restrained yet poignant snapshots of a marriage viewed in retrospect--domestic moments that serve as subtle metaphors for a failing relationship. For instance, Emerson describes various homes that she and her husband occupied--houses that appear sound on the surface, but that include occupants like spiders, bees, bats, and termites, suggesting a marriage that is internally unsound. "Natural History Exhibits," for example, describes the newlywed poet opening up her silverware drawer to find a coiled snake. Rather than killing it, she hesitates and eases the drawer shut, letting the snake exit the way it came, but washing "every fork, spoon, and knife" afterwards. Her misgivings and her attempt to overlook the event mirror her handling of her early marital regrets. Another recurring image involves trapped birds--an orphaned cedar waxwing, a hawk caught in a batter's cage, and, in "A Bird in the House," the poet herself as a bird... the displaced "late wife" that her ex-husband's new wife chases out.

In the collection's final section, Emerson opens a window on her current relationship--one haunted by the ghost of her beloved's deceased "late wife," yet ultimately hopeful. In "Leave No Trace," a conscientious hiking trip becomes a meaningful metaphor for the subtle footprints we can't help but leave in each others' lives, yet Emerson's eyes are fixed confidently on her companion "on the trail just ahead."

This lovely, empathic collection is well worth a careful reading.

This author knows how to capture the nuances of life that most of us can relate to. I found that I could not put this book down. I will be re-reading this approachable "story" many times.

Wow! Mrs. Emerson captures her readers from the first poem and pulls them through 54 pages of grief and recovery.

Her stanzas are clear and her imagery visible, but her true poetic ability exists within being able to write two stories at once; rather than using single-object symbolism, every poem in itself is a small, everyday action or event that she uses to parallel her theme of divorce.

"Late Wife" is a genuine work of art that helps the public to empathize with what happens, on an emotional level, in a divorce, and is surely worthy of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.