A Book About Divorce & Death You'll Want To Read More Than Once?! Really?! Really.

Claudia Emerson's Late Wife (LSU, 2005)


Rereading Claudia Emerson’s Late Wife, I was struck by how warmly it welcomes its readers. Emerson’s “I” maintains a consistent identity, so much so that the book gains a narrator. That’s an unusual element for a poetry collection; in this case it offers the habitual reader of fiction or memoir something familiar, even as the book remains within the boundaries of poetry. There are metrical and formal virtuosities to spare, should a reader wish to look for them, but what inspires that second look is how the single lens of the “I” threads the poems together.

In Second Bearing, 1919, the narrator recounts her father’s boyhood story of how the family curing barn burned to the ground with an entire year’s tobacco crop inside. Frantic and trying to save something, anything, the family kept dousing a nearby peach tree in the hope it might survive. It did, and “in the late fall, the tree/ broke into bloom, perhaps having/ misunderstood the fire to be/ some brief, backward winter.” Even as it provides a glimpse of family history, this echoes two poems from the book’s first, more recent, section. In The Last Christmas, her soon to be ex-husband insists he rose from his sickbed to see her, outside chopping firewood, “small, mute beneath the window frame,/ [his] breath forming, freezing on the panes/ until [he] could not see [her].” In Chimney Fire, the couple’s “breathing had turned to ice” and one night when “the fire would not/ be kept; the chimney caught it, and we watched,/ heard it pour up into the tree.” But that’s not to say this book is all destruction. The winter returns in the penultimate poem, Leave No Trace, in the form of a frozen fog that “had left perfect white stockings on the trees.” 

The lens of the narrator joins all of these various iterations into a single, complex experience. Winter is what it is, but depending upon your circumstances, it can represent any number of states. In The Last Christmas  and Chimney Fire, winter’s death is foregrounded and threatens to consume the couple on their way to divorce. In Second Bearing, 1919, fire tricks the peach tree into spring production, but the missing winter means the fruit lacks a seed, at once “infertile, and endless somehow.” Winter, then, is a necessity for new growth. And last, in Leave No Trace, the winter is beautiful, putting its “opalescent sheen on every surface” while the new couple enjoys a picnic. But the season’s teeth are still there, just held at bay by the narrator’s state of mind. Near where the couple sits to eat, “A narrow stream/ still moved beneath its own freezing like the barest/ pulse that persists a while after the breathing goes.” 

That all sounds pretty depressing, but it’s not. The beauty of these poems is their joy of discovery, how the narrator pieces together an understanding of heartbreak as a simultaneously inevitable but impermanent state. It’s hard won, and makes the epigraph, by Theodore Roethke, perfectly apropos: “What else to say?/ We end in joy.”