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.
]]>Pinion is ultimately a wrenching elegy that Rose creates. She is the one who escaped, only to realize, "I survive them all, but I find I have become the house they keep."
]]>"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 solitary women, the children's innocence allowing them to see in farther than the gossips can. The fourth section offers studies of women and men in situations in which gender, with all of its complexities, figures powerfully.
The follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize-winning collection Late Wife, Figure Studies upholds Emerson's place among contemporary poetry's elite.
When the only ladies' dress shop closed,
she was left on the street for trash, unsalvageable,
one arm missing, lost at the shoulder, one leg
at the hip. But she was wearing a blue-sequined negligee
and blonde wig, so they helped themselves to her
on a lark--drunken impulse--and for years kept her
leaning in a corner, beside an attic
window, rendered invisible. The dusk
was also perpetual in the garage below,
punctuated only by bare bulbs hung close
over the engines. An oily grime coated
the walls, and a decade of calendars promoted
stock-car drivers, women in dated swimsuits,
even their bodies out of fashion. Radio distorted
there; cigarette smoke moaned, the pedal steel
conceding to that place a greater, echoing
sorrow. So, lame, forgotten prank, she remained, <BR> back turned forever to the dark storage <P> <P>behind her, gaze leveled just above <BR> anyone's who could have looked up <P> <P>to mistake in the cast of her face fresh longing--<BR> her expression still reluctant figure for it. <P> <P>--"The Mannequin above Main Street Motors"
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