Books

Poet Claudia Emerson begins Figure Studies with a twenty-five-poem lyric sequence called “All Girls School,” offering intricate views of a richly imagined boarding school for girls. Whether focused on a lesson, a teacher, or the girls themselves as they collectively “school”–or refuse to–the poems explore ways girls are “trained” in the broadest sense of the word.

The follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize-winning collection Late Wife, Figure Studies upholds Emerson’s place among contemporary poetry’s elite.

In this eloquent long poem, Claudia Emerson employs the voices of two family members on a small southern farm to examine the universal complexities of place, generation, memory, and identity. Alternating between the voices of Preacher and Sister, Pinion is narrated by the younger, surviving sister Rose, in whose memory the now-gone family and farm vividly live on.

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.”

Winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. In Late Wife, a woman explores her disappearance from one life and reappearance in another as she addresses her former husband, herself, and her new husband in a series of epistolary poems. Though not satisfied in her first marriage, she laments vanishing from the life she and her husband shared for years. She then describes the unexpected joys of solitude during her recovery and emotional convalescence. Finally, in a sequence of sonnets, she speaks to her new husband, whose first wife died from lung cancer. The poems highlight how the speaker’s rebeginning in this relationship has come about in part because of two couples’ respective losses.

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.”