Claude Before Time and Space - (Southern Messenger Poets) by Claudia Emerson (Paperback)

About the Book

"The final complete collection from Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Claudia Emerson demonstrates a poet in the throes of experimentation as she quietly but fiercely explores the subjugation of mortality and time"--Amazon.com.

Book Synopsis

In Claude before Time and Space, her final collection, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Claudia Emerson quietly but fiercely explores the themes of mortality and time.

In the first section of this book, "The Wheel," Emerson uses a rural southern setting in poems that reflect on memory, the self, and relationships. In section two, "Bird Ephemera, " she explores historical figures--from an early naturalist and writer who raised her children in poverty to a small-town doctor. The collection concludes with a series of poems named after the poet's father. This illuminating body of work displays a master poet at the height of her craft.

Review Quotes

Claudia Emerson's carefully made, thoughtful, and unsparing last poems have a kind of wildness in them, a feeling of being released, a fatefulness that unspools in ways that are both surprising and inevitable. This book is her final and finest achievement.--Edward Hirsch

Emerson never tried to overwhelm the reader with a lot of curtain chewing and scene stealing. She was a solitary, an off-in-the-corner type, a classic observer--as observant as a sniper. . . . In her last months, Emerson added much to an art that was delicate but indomitable.--William Logan, New Criterion

About the Author

Claudia Emerson published six poetry collections, including Late Wife, Secure the Shadow, The Opposite House, and Impossible Bottle. Before her death in 2014, she was professor of English and a member of the creative writing faculty at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. Emerson served as poet laureate of Virginia and won numerous awards for teaching and writing, including the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.