late wife: poems by Claudia Emerson

If you don't read poems, and you want to start, Claudia Emerson's Pulitzer Prize winning book would be a perfect jumping off point. She writes in the narrative style and her poems are very accessible. They are also beautiful. The final poem in this little book is about her current husband buying a turtle from some boys who are teasing it, some might say torturing it. After they buy it, they let it go. Listen to these lines: We were/already forgotten, then, like most gods/after floods recede, after fevers break. This is just a short sample of the wonder she creates.

The book is setup in three sections: the old relationship and her divorce, being alone and ruminating on the past, and her new relationship and living with the ghost of her new husband's dead wife. While each poem stands alone, the books is also a story of love lost and reclaimed.

The natural world plays a big part in these poems and I really liked that, it makes them easy to relate to.

Poetry is a hard sell these days, too bad. For people who read a lot and maybe write, poetry shows how language can stretch and bend and find exact moments in time that need to be savored and studied over and over. Certainly dipping into poetry anthologies is one way to go, but sometimes it is imperative that we stick with one poet to see where he or she can take us. Claudia Emerson takes us deep into her life and gives us something to compare ourselves to.

This is a five star offering.