Pharaoh, Pharaoh: Poems

by Claudia Emerson

Written by the winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, Pharaoh, Pharaoh 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.

Genres: Poetry

72 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 1997

About the author

Born and raised in Chatham, Virginia, Claudia Emerson studied writing at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. Her poetry, steeped in the Southern Narrative tradition, bears the influences of Ellen Bryant Voigt, Betty Adcock, and William Faulkner. Of the collection Late Wife (2005), poet Deborah Pope observed, “Like the estranged lover in one of her poems who pitches horseshoes in the dark with preternatural precision, so Emerson sends her words into a different kind of darkness with steely exactness, their arc of perception over and over striking true.”

Emerson’s volumes of poetry include Pharaoh, Pharaoh (1997); Pinion: An Elegy (2002); Late Wife (2005), which won the Pulitzer Prize; Figure Studies (2008); and Secure the Shadow (2012).

Her honors include two additional Pulitzer Prize nominations as well as fellowships from the Library of Congress, the Virginia Commission for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2008 she was appointed poet laureate of Virginia, a two-year role.

Emerson was poetry editor for the Greensboro Review and a contributing editor for Shenandoah. She taught at Washington and Lee University, Randolph-Macon Women’s College, and the University of Mary Washington. She died in 2014.

From The Poetry Foundation website.
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/c...

Reviews

[David Anthony Sam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Claudia Emerson's untimely death leaves me wondering what wonderful poetry she would have written. Luckily, we have a number of outstanding collections. "Pharaoh, Pharaoh," while published nearly 20 years ago, remains a deeply moving collection of vignettes. Emerson faces death and illness with a cold eye for detail but a heart filled with empathy.

The phrasing feels conversational, but then sudden brilliant gems arise:

Veins as "the dispassionate cursive on the backs/of her hands." A coffin "inhaled the earth." A sewing needle" its only eye worn wide, diminishing."

She remembers a woman lost in death, imagining her (as we imagine Emerson) flooring the gas pedal on a wild car as she is "gone before/this fire consumes itself in the void from which she rises."

This is a fine collection, worth living with for some time.

[Gavin · Rating 5 out of 5]

As always, Claudia's narrative poetic voice never fails to impress and move me. I read her later books before reading this one (re-read them as well), but this is my favorite: it's quite experimental in searching for its voice and form, and even when she's "pushing it" to the edge, it comes out as an absolutely beautiful and captivating production....there's a number of artists whose first-works I love because they put on display their struggle (however great or small) with their craft and which ultimately turn into masterpieces. This is one such artwork.

...I wish she were still with us so we could keep hearing more of her haunting, highly personal (yet universal) Song of the South.

[Diann Blakely]

Claudia Emerson’s poems are redolent with our regional soil and its seasonal varieties: the fragrances of raw spring earth; summer-mud lusciousness; frosted, autumnal fields stripped to dirt after harvest; and the oddly fecund smell of ground hollowed and deepened for a midwinter funeral. Indeed, there’s a lot of dead chill in Emerson Andrews’ work. In “Cleaning the Graves,” a poem from PHARAOH, PHARAOH, her 1997 collection, she describes herself as “descended from...loss.” Her grandmother was “a woman who trapped / snowbirds for potpie, who let hens nest / in the kitchen in freezing weather / so they would lay better, who could wring their heads / from their bodies in one motion”; her mother tells the author that her blood too is that cold, “but you don’t know it yet, never / had hard times.” Emerson’s South is tobacco country, once composed of small farms and now owned by corporations, its inhabitants mostly fled to cities but feeling that loss of place like the ache of an amputated limb—not because that place was one they loved, but because it defined them. Her second volume, PINION, spoken in the alternating voices of a brother and sister, takes these themes even deeper, but neither this book nor PHARAOH, PHARAOH feels ultimately grim. Emerson''s language is gorgeous but reticent, aware, always, that it remains in service to a larger task: commemorating, even celebrating, her family and the hard ground from which it sprang.

[MK · Rating 5 out of 5]

Claudia Emerson is a riveting, emotionally raw, and brutally honest poet who never ceases to capture my imagination and pull snugly on my heartstrings. Beautiful work.

[Rhonda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Evocative of the hardscrabble farms and relations and stories stuck in the throat we visited when I was a child, the barebone places my grandmother left behind.