Late Wife: Poems

By Claudia Emerson

Book Overview

Winner of the 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 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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0807130842
• ISBN13: 9780807130841
• Release Date: September 2005
• Publisher: LSU Press
• Length: 64 Pages
• Weight: 0.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.2" x 5.8" x 8.8"

Customer Reviews

Poignant

This author knows how to capture the nuances of life that most of us can relate to. I found that I could not put this book down. I will be re-reading this approachable "story" many times.

Fleeting permanence

I've only read this book once, which isn't really enough for most poetry - or for these poems - but the fleeting impression of something deeply wrong, something radiantly right, something lost but always retained leads me to write about it now. This book haunts you the way an old love affair, a failed marriage, or a missed opportunity lingers in your mind after the second cup of coffee. I read these poems in a parking lot waiting for someone to return, in an airport waiting for a loved one to arrive, and in bed when I couldn't fall asleep. Claudia Emerson was there with me - or actually it felt like she had been there before and I heard her echo, felt her departed presence. The language of the poems felt intentional, concrete, full of meaning and suggestion. The poems tingle, poised between death and renewal, loss and discovery, and that owes something to the language. I haven't lived with them long enough to know how they work, but this is a group of poems worth the time.

GOod for a non poetry reading person

I almost exclusively read nonfiction, but saw this author on tv after winning a pulitzer. I decided to give it a try, and find her poetry to be very moving.

Wow-- an incredible book

Timeless poems that reveal, through domestic detail, the complexities of the heart. I am so glad this book won the pulitzer. Deeply heartfelt, yet complicated and brave enough to resist declining into the sentimental. I can think of no recent book that writes of the shadowy emotions of loss and hope as this.