An Elegy for an Elegiast: Claudia Emerson
News
by Elizabeth Hoover
In “Infusion Suite,” a poem published in a recent issue of the Missouri Review, Claudia Emerson writes of a chemotherapy bag attached “umbilical-like that almost invisible line.” Then her perspective shifts:
The trees outside the tall window appear
still full with summer, crows’ flight — more
like drunken tumbling — something to see
while I agree that yes, yes, this is me.
Emerson died of complications related to cancer on December 4, 2014 and left behind a body of work that, while limning pain and loss, keeps looking outward to beauty in the landscape.
Born in 1957 in Chatham, Va., Emerson’s work developed in the incubator of the literary tradition of the south, which celebrates the southern landscape. “Even though I’ve never owned an inch of land in my life,” she told the Washington Post, “I feel very much tied to it.”
This was a long incubation. She published her first book of poetry Pharaoh, Pharaoh in 1997, when she was 40 years old. Less than ten years later, she received the Pulitzer Prize for Late Wife, a book of elegiac poems that explores the ache of loss and the pain of divorce.
Before finding her way to poetry, she was a mail carrier and managed a bookstore in Danville, Va. “My life was an interesting one,” she once told the “NewsHour” public affairs program, “of being bound in this shop with lots of books, and then sometimes getting out on the mail route and being alone all day long, looking at the landscape.”
In the bookstore she came across Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke and Journal of Solitude by May Sarton. These disparate volumes inspired her to begin writing poetry in earnest. She studied writing at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro and taught at the University of Mary Washington for 15 years before taking a post at Virginia Commonwealth University. She was the poet laureate of Virginia 2008–2010. While the commonwealth’s laureate, she delivered the keynote address at Furious Flower’s first Collegiate Summit.
Her sixth collection of poetry Opposite House is due out in 2015. In reflecting on Emerson’s life and work, her colleague at VCU Kathleen Gruber remarked to the Roanoke Times, “She continues to give us an ongoing model of how to be fully alive and actively engaged in the world.”
