Pharaoh, Pharaoh (Southern Messenger Poets) [Paperback]

Claudia Emerson Andrews (Author), Claudia Emerson (Author), Dave Smith (Editor)

Book Description

Series: Southern Messenger Poets | Publication Date: May 1, 1997

Written by the winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, Pharaoh, Pharoah is a meditation on time, memory, inheritance, and the irony of loss-loss of one's land, of one's past, of love itself. With senses keenly attuned to every nuance of light and landscape, Claudia Emerson Andrews invests her lines with a scriptural fire. She captures equally and with apparent effortlessness the bewilderment of the culturally bereft in the "stuttered eloquence" of an auctioneer and the evanescence of appearances in the image of a dying firefly "coughing up light." In this postlapsarian pastoral of the modern Southeast, Andrews summons a cast of characters bound to times and places of desolation, yet unable to leave because it is that very desolation-the plagues, the scourges, the losses and heartbreak-that has defined them. Their collective cry of exultant despair is compressed in the astonishing final lines of "Plagues": "Pharaoh, Pharaoh, as if there were something keeping us, as if we could be let go." Andrews brings to these poems a vision so clear, so miraculously right, that the pages themselves seem suffused with the scents of sunlight and new-mown hay. Pharaoh, Pharaoh is a lovely, spellbinding reminder of what we discard, what we keep-and why.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Abandoned Farm Grave
Airstream
Auction
Bait
Bait Man
Bait Man: 1. Before
Bait Man: 2. The Fall
Bait Man: 3. After
Barn Cat
Bedtime Story
Cleaning The Graves
First Tooth
Fortune
Going Once, Going Twice
Gossip
Hawk
In The Acoustic Shadow
Inheritance
The Milk Cow Speaks Of Winter
The Moon Is Made
Morphine Dreams
Nothing For The Salt
One Hand On The Wheel
Phoenix
Photograph With A Quote From Yazoo: Deep In Each Other's Dre
Plagues
Portrait
Prodigal
Romantic Fever
Searching The Title: 1. In The Courthouse
Searching The Title: 3. The Legend
Skin Deep
Stable
The Taxidermist
Timepiece
Transgressions
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder® --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 76 pages
• Publisher: Louisiana State University Press (May 1, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0807121592
• ISBN-13: 978-0807121597
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 5.5 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #899,235 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A mesmerizing, personal journey, October 7, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Pharaoh, Pharaoh (Southern Messenger Poets) (Paperback)

Claudia Emerson Andrews's Pharaoh, Pharaoh is the rarest and best kind of discovery: a book full of poems by an author who has found her voice and allowed it to free, rather than limit, her explorations. Demanding to be read aloud alone or to others, the rhythm and language bring the reader along on a remarkable journey. Full of gentle reminiscences and powerful histories, Pharaoh, Pharaoh is quiet and profound, capturing moments in time and meaning with a heartbreaking and familiar clarity. The first book of the Southern Messenger series, Pharaoh, Pharaoh, like all the best Southern writing, contains messages for all its readers. Become one.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Haunting, beautiful, sensitive distillation of rural life, July 8, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Pharaoh, Pharaoh (Southern Messenger Poets) (Paperback)

Arrests your consciousness with its imagery and language. Rewards thoughtful reading with its insight and wisdom. The fundamental themes of generations and inheritance are a modern echo of Ecclesiastes. This is the best debut collection of poems I've read in years.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A brutally beautiful collection, April 14, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Pharaoh, Pharaoh (Southern Messenger Poets) (Paperback)

This book is so excellent that I've already purchased three extra copies to pass along to friends. Andrews' poems explore the instability of memory, family, and ownership, drawing on the experiences of the narrator and her Southern family, the dissolution of their land, the objects of their history, time and the past. Andrews exhibits amazing control of her art form; her poems are breathtaking in their clarity--emotional without seeming overwrought, as beautiful as they are brutal, and as personal as they are universal.

The obvious thing to say is that this book will appeal to fans of Faulkner and other great Southern writers, but Pharaoh, Pharaoh will be appreciated by anyone who likes good poetry.