Secure the Shadow: Poems

by Claudia Emerson

Daringly realistic and artfully mediated by past and present, Claudia Emerson's Secure the Shadow contains historical pieces as well as poems centering on the deaths of the poet's brother and father. Emerson covers all aspects of the tragedies that, as Keats believed, contribute to our human collective of Soul-making, in which each death accrues into an immortal web of ongoing love and meaning for the living. Emerson's unwavering gaze shows that loss cannot be eluded, but can be embraced in elegies as devastating as they are beautiful.
The macabre title poem refers to the old custom of making daguerreotypes, primitive photographs, of deceased loved ones. Other striking poems describe animal deaths -- mysterious calf killings, a hog slaughter, the burial of a dead jay, identifiable / but light, dry, its eyes vacant orbits.
Death, as the speaker's heart and mind instruct her, exists in a shadow world. When the body disappears, the shadow also flees. By securing the shadow, the poet finds a representation of the dead's soul, a soul always linked to the body. Hence, Emerson's attention to the minute details of the body's repose -- reflected in the long, related sequence of refrained poems -- never allows its memory to fade.

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

First published February 15, 2012

About the author

Born and raised in Chatham, Virginia, Claudia Emerson studied writing at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. Her poetry, steeped in the Southern Narrative tradition, bears the influences of Ellen Bryant Voigt, Betty Adcock, and William Faulkner. Of the collection Late Wife (2005), poet Deborah Pope observed, “Like the estranged lover in one of her poems who pitches horseshoes in the dark with preternatural precision, so Emerson sends her words into a different kind of darkness with steely exactness, their arc of perception over and over striking true.”

Emerson’s volumes of poetry include Pharaoh, Pharaoh (1997); Pinion: An Elegy (2002); Late Wife (2005), which won the Pulitzer Prize; Figure Studies (2008); and Secure the Shadow (2012).

Her honors include two additional Pulitzer Prize nominations as well as fellowships from the Library of Congress, the Virginia Commission for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2008 she was appointed poet laureate of Virginia, a two-year role.

Emerson was poetry editor for the Greensboro Review and a contributing editor for Shenandoah. She taught at Washington and Lee University, Randolph-Macon Women’s College, and the University of Mary Washington. She died in 2014.

From The Poetry Foundation website.
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/c...

Reviews

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

Secure the Shadow is probably the darkest collection I've read by Emerson (though the other collections were also dark). In her latest effort, the subject of death is dominant. The title poem, which features photographs of dead children (a common practice in the 19th Century), reads like something from Wisconsin Death Trip. Two deaths in particular are Emerson's focus: her brother's and her father's. Emerson's brother would die young, while her father would pass away in his 90s. The linkage is of course the poet's own life, and in the end, her own approaching end. Emerson's examination of the passing of time, and memory, is outstanding. I also appreciated, as a fellow Virginian, the familiar geography of her poems. Highly recommended.

Here's a link to a poem that recently ran in "Poetry."

http://poems.com/poem.php?date=15465

[Sam · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection did some growing on me. Death is one of its largest focuses, which I have appreciated during this period in my life, but there are also many moments of beauty. Nostalgia is another feeling repeatedly felt. Lots of reflecting on the youth the speaker has left behind (hotel pools, things around the old town, her first school, etc.). I tended to fixate on the death theme, but some of the most striking images and lines has nothing to do with it:

"... but I
understand now that when
a bird sleeps under its own wing,
it is the world that ceases to see" ("Variations from the porch").

Cancer appears throughout the collection, which is unsurprising given the author's biography and I almost sought it out because of my own. The "Half-Life" poem blows me away, and numerous poems hint at her brother's fatal association with the disease. With that context the happy closing toast of "After Hours: A Glimpse of the Radiologist," "the nothing here at all," shines more brightly and tragically.

I would almost give this five stars, and will recommend it to many people I am sure. It didn't hit me quite as hard as Late Wife, but would be a career high point for just about anyone else.

[David Anthony Sam · Rating 5 out of 5]

"And I, as I have always known myself,
am fallen away then from the present
tense into reminiscence--the lucid was."

So Claudia Emerson wrote in this fine collection published in 2012, just a few short years before she did indeed become the "was" no longer lucid. Secure the Shadows is her way of taking stills of what has died, her father, animals, and her future self, now lost to us forever, except in the wonderful poetry she left behind.

Her eloquence is in the exact word and image. Her emotion is never untrue but always real---and measured just enough to be contained within those words and images. Emerson's poetry is very personal and autobiographical---but in her experience we read ourselves and indeed the universal human experience.

Most of the great poets writing today are women. It is sad that we lost this one so very early in her life and with so much more we wish we could have heard from her. So take the time to read this collection and the others that we have.

[Courtney LeBlanc · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of poems about family, death/dying, identity, teaching, and love.

from Half-Life: Pittsylvania County, Virginia: "ignorant of the worse cost / of confusing what chooses us with what we choose, / the near-infinite half-life of remains."

from Student Conference: "(Her poems: careful, / deliberate, thin as she was, haunted by a mother // years dead—not a word about the brief grief / of the father who saw in her a worsening // resemblance."

from Animal Funerals, 1964: "we did not simply walk through / the valley of the shadow of death: // we set up camp there"

[Xylina · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't typically pick up a poetry book, especially contemporary poetry, but this was just so so lovely to read. The titles are so clever, the collection is artfully arranged, and depictions of grief and memory are so intense.
"But this was anguish, not yet grief. And so I slowed but did not stop to watch someone else's tragedy burn past this brief, nearly beautiful suspension that changes nothing"

[Laurin · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5

[Tracy Riva · Rating 5 out of 5]

Secure the Shadow
By Claudia Emerson
Published by Louisiana State University Press
Hardcover ISBN 13: 978-0807143025 $47.33 Paperback ISBN 13: 978-0807143032 $14.21 Kindle ASIN B007FRK7V8 $9.99

Secure the Shadow is a book of poems by the writer Claudia Emerson. The poems delve deeply into human nature, life on the farm, and death, both animal and human. Memories are laid out in a manner that makes them easy for all readers to relate to. The poetess also makes strong use of imagery until one can see and hear the scenes described upon the pages.

I found Secure the Shadow evoked a melancholy mood and visceral reaction. The writer’s subject matter is varied and while it can certainly be argued that she is exorcising some personal demons this does not take over the entirety of the material or negate the fine quality of writing present.

While I loved the use of imagery and how vividly the scenes came to life, I felt all of them were touched with a dab of drudgery. Of course, the writer looks at rural farm life through a lens of reality rather than the idealized image of rural life that many carry in their imagination. While there is an innocence and naivety that comes across because of this, there is a strong opposing influence brought about by the reality of chores, the difficulty of life and the rather bloody task of killing and butchering animals. This juxtaposition brings added depth to this work and makes it truly enjoyable.

I would recommend Secure the Shadow to the serious reader of poetry. It is well worth the short time it takes to read it and it would be a welcome addition to a permanent library.

[Roxanne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Five stars. Not much more to say but that it's a grief that we won't have any more poems from Claudia, which, along with rejoicing in the beautiful poems we do have, is what I think about when I read her work.

[Juliana Gray · Rating 5 out of 5]

In these gorgeous, moving poems, Emerson remembers her late father and brother, as well as a vanished Southern way of life, "securing the shadow" in line and image. This is a sad and beautiful book.

[Danielle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such a gorgeous and haunting book, one I will come back to again and again.