Late wife : poems

Title:

Late wife : poems

Personal Author:

Emerson, Claudia, 1957-2014.

ISBN:

9780807130834

9780807130841

Publication Information:

Baton Rouge : Louisiana State University Press, c2005.

Physical Description:

viii, 54 pages ; 24 cm.

Series:

Southern messenger poets

Southern messenger poets.

General Note:

Series statement on jacket.

Electronic Access:

Table of contents http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/ecip059/2005006033.html

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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 rebeginning in this relationship has come about in part because of two couples? respective losses.

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.

Author Notes

Claudia Emerson was born on January 13, 1957 in Chatham, Virginia. She received a bachelor's of arts degree in English at the University of Virginia in 1979 and a master's degree in fine arts in creative writing from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in 1991. Her collections of poetry included Pharaoh, Pharaoh; Pinion: An Elegy; Figure Studies: Poems; Secure the Shadow; The Opposite House; and Impossible Bottle. She received the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 2006 for Late Wife. She served as Virginia's poet laureate from 2008 to 2010. She taught at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg and at Virginia Commonwealth University. She died on December 4, 2014 from complications associated with colon cancer at the age of 57.

(Bowker Author Biography)

Natural History Exhibits	p. 1
I Divorce Epistles
Aftermath	p. 5
Photograph: Farm Auction	p. 6
Rent	p. 7
Surface Hunting	p. 9
Waxwing	p. 10
Chimney Fire	p. 11
Eight Ball	p. 13
Pitching Horseshoes	p. 14
The Last Christmas	p. 15
Metaphor	p. 17
Possessions	p. 18
A Bird in the House	p. 19
The Spanish Lover	p. 20
Frame	p. 21
II Breaking Up the House
My Grandmother's Plot in the Family Cemetery	p. 25
The Change	p. 26
Breaking Up the House	p. 27
House-Sitting	p. 28
Second Bearing, 1919	p. 29
Drought	p. 31
The Audubon Collection	p. 32
The Practice Cage	p. 34
Atlas	p. 36
Migraine: Aura and Aftermath	p. 38
III Late Wife: Letters to Kent
Artifact	p. 41
The Hospital	p. 42
Pond Turtle	p. 43
Daybook	p. 44
The Cough	p. 45
The X-Rays	p. 46
Corrective	p. 47
Homecoming	p. 48
Driving Glove	p. 49
Furnace	p. 50
Stringed Instrument Collection	p. 51
Old English	p. 52
Leave No Trace	p. 53
Buying the Painted Turtle	p. 54

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Summary

Summary

Author Notes

Table of Contents