The Opposite House: Poems

L.E. Phillabaum Poetry Award

by Claudia Emerson

With graceful lines swooping like a bird in flight, Claudia Emerson's newest collection explores the harsh realities of aging and the limitations of the human body, as well as the loneliness, fear, and anger that can accompany us as we live.
Keenly observed and beautifully executed, these poems move from the grim facade that hides beauty-prosthetic eyes- to the beautiful scene that conceals violence-a rural retreat. Emerson also considers once common things that are fast becoming obsolete: cursive writing, telephone booths, barbers.
At once hopeful and cognizant of all the reasons why humans might despair, these poems echo with remarkable insight into the true nature of life."

Genres: Poetry

72 pages, Paperback

First published March 4, 2015

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

[Bill Glose · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pulitzer-Prize winning poet Claudia Emerson died in Richmond this past December at the age of 57, succumbing to complications due to colon cancer. Her sixth book of poetry, The Opposite House, was already in production at the time. The posthumous publication’s opening inscription, a quote from Emily Dickenson, can come as a bit of a shock: “There’s been a death, in the Opposite House.”

As might be guessed from this inscription, the theme of this collection centers on loss. The book is split into three sections, with the middle section containing short elegies mourning the loss of things from bygone days, such as telephone booths, drive-in movie theaters, and the teaching of cursive in school.

But the poems in the other two sections are intensely personal, including the same subject matter she plumbed in Late Wife (divorce and the death of others) plus the sensitive subjects of cancer and her own impending death. While these issues are sometimes held at a distance by her use of the third person, their emotional weight grants them a powerful presence. In “Ephemeris,” Emerson writes:

The household sells in a morning, but when
they cannot let the house itself go for
the near-nothing it brings at auction,
the children, all beyond their middle years,
carry her back to it, the mortgage now
a dead pledge of patience.

Still, playfulness can be found in the collection. “Love Bird” focuses on a bird flitting through the house, while the hint of her dissolved marriage rumbles at the periphery.

She would spoil it
with crumbs from her biscuit
but it prefers the teacup’s steep
lip, its hunger for the small
rubies embedded in the ring
she still wears.”

Emerson’s ability to capture the mystery of everyday moments in great detail makes these poems eminently readable. Throughout this book, she scrutinizes the deepest longings of her innermost thoughts, performing a microscopic inspection of her id and ego. But she also turns her perceptive eye on all those she encounters, from the most intimate examination of her father working third shift in a factory to blot out memories of war to the daily routines of a greengrocer who “bends over peaches / and berries, culling out by sight the overripe.”

The specificity and import of Emerson’s words elevate ordinary people in everyday situations into remarkable characters. She exposes the familiar in a way that makes us wonder how we could have seen the same thing for so long and not realized its critical essence. And when she writes about her personal losses and her own deteriorating condition, we cannot help but feel we are reading about someone we know deeply and personally. The Opposite House contains Emerson’s last musings, her last breaths. It is a remarkable ending to a remarkable poet’s life. It is her farewell gift to us.

[Sam · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was the first collection published after Emerson’s tragic passing at the end of 2014, and it has taken me some time to get around to reading it. I think that, along with Impossible Bottle (which was released later in 2015—I haven’t read Claude Before Space and Time yet), The Opposite House really illustrates how much beauty cancer robbed the world of when it took Claudia Emerson from us.

I think that you would be hard-pressed to find a poet who paid as close attention to the poetic line as Emerson. OK, maybe that’s a bit hyperbolic, but she really know how to wring everything out of her often-short lines: “a dead pledge of patience. Almost emptied” (Ephemeris v. 6), “to guarantee what they will find when they cut” (Greengrocer v. 17), “though poorly executed, its likely demise” (Cursive v. 6), and I could go on.

I think that Linguist (p. 14) is one of the most beautiful elegies, or poems of any sort, that I have ever read. I took the last class ever taught by the woman whom the poem is dedicated to, Dr. Kakava, and the way that that the poem blends together Kakava’s past, present, and future is jaw dropping:

The real sea
is kept as it always was for afternoon,
and afternoon’s edge is its own language,
waves the weft-faced push and pull, syllable
and salt-laced syntax the tide she plunges,
herself the needle, now, the needle’s lyric eye. (closing stanza)

I just feel like that final image, of the self as both thing (needle) and absence (needle’s eye), demonstrates both why Emerson belongs on the pantheons of the greats and also how soft-spoken her poetic voice often was. As great poetry often does, this shines a light on something small and easily overlooked. She “takes the familiar and makes it strange,” as my wife has described the process of writing poetry.

Lightning also ends with an image that just blew me away. I was already inclined to love it because the cow is my favorite animal, but just:

Its body mere shape, its color
he recalls as weathered marble,
cratered light, the fluid muscle
that makes no allusion to bone.
When the creature lowers its head
to graze in what had been the sky’s
highest branches, it becomes them—
both form and insatiable void. (vv. 10-17)

And there’s more! “and the fainter but fevered keening of dogs / somewhere, scent-pitched, bodiless as though distance / itself had a voice and desire” (Scarecrow at the Forks of Buffalo vv. 23-25). And Limb Factory! And Rural Letter Carrier! And The Ocularist!

These poems, Emerson’s poems in general, need to be read. They do not speak with the overt, often politically-oriented, urgency of many prize winners (and nominees) writing these days, but they leave a mark just the same.

[M · Rating 5 out of 5]

House Sparrows

They are here, in the eaves, the clothesline pole,
hayloft—everywhere she looks—and everywhere
she goes they are there before her, in town,
in streetlamps, hooded stoplights, in letters
at the pharmacy, cursive, neon serifs.
She knows they prefer human-made hollows,
though she finds them also in the branches
of evergreens and hawthorns. She entices
the nieces and nephews, whom she dislikes
in equal measure, with a Sunday afternoon’s
escape from themselves, and so they learn
to follow her while she spots a nest, then
knocks it down with the longest pole on the place.
They race to it—small-domed thing—to break it
open like a present, unwrap outer
layers of twigs and roots, tear past the middle
membrane of woven grass, sometimes scraps
of cloth, to find the warm, innermost lining
of feathers. If there is a clutch of eggs,
they have learned to throw them, speckled bluish-
white—warped marbles—against the barn’s wall,
where they explode into a constellation
of watery stars.
If there are hatchlings,
the children, delighted, toss them, one
after the other, into the chicken yard—
where she has despaired most of all the bold
greed with which sparrows steal feed. The chickens,
who have never minded sparrows, fight
each other for this tender-boned, sweet scream
of rarest meat falling into the lot
they will too soon return to keeping, grassless
as a cemetery swept clean of grief.

[Sera · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection of poetry leaves you with a changed view of loss. Whereas most people choose to believe that loss results in emptiness, Emerson’s writing says otherwise. Loss is simply a vector for change, and it allows us to find a quiet comfort in the memories left behind. I would highly recommend this to anyone looking for poems to re-visit again and again.

[Patricia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Review to be written soon.

[Courtney LeBlanc · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not sure anything can top Emerson's The Late Wife but I felt a bit let down by this book and had a hard time feeling pulled in by the poems.

from Third: " Graveyard shift / made them all equal, all orphaned; those with families / saw them Sundays, after its own ghost. / It was easier to bear what no one else wanted-- / a world just lightening when his shift ended, the river / they all crossed running with the night's dye."

from Virginia Christian: "She was not born / dead, but buried-- / in the slow certain / strike of / conception, the quickening / into another / girlchild too clack--"

I enjoyed the poems about historical figures (there are several) but overall didn't feel connected to the poems.

[David Anthony Sam · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is heartbreaking to read these poems---both because they are poignant, real, and heartfelt and because Claudia Emerson dies at far too young an age. My rating is of the poetry, and not in sympathy for her loss. Here, Emerson speaks for the voiceless, dramatic monologues and lyrics for such characters as a glass-eye maker, a man whose father was a suicide, an aged dying woman, and many others. Some of the poems feel more autobiographical, but all show Emerson able to exert the "negative capability" of silencing herself enough to give words to others. And what words they are, simple, eloquent, and true.

[Books the cat · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Opposite House poses this question: Is absence empty? And it answers: No, absence is always filled with echoes of sentience. This is both reassuring and haunting, because neither loss nor silence is total. The poems are all designed to appreciate this position, and while at their weakest they are sentimental, at their strongest they are ethereal.

[Alane · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a hospice chaplain I turn to Emerson to speak what is the every day in the valley of the shadow of death. This collection is particularly illuminated, perhaps by her own illness. I will miss her so.

[Rebecca Schwarz · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've only just discovered Ms Emerson. The abandoned room on the cover, filled with soft light, is very like many of her poems, which bring the dead back to life to move through rooms that have fallen into disrepair since their departure. Lovely. I'll be reading more of her work.

[Juliana Gray · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is too beautiful for me to write about. I'll need to read it again before I can do it justice. So good.

[Danielle · Rating 5 out of 5]

My late friend's last book. She is absolute master of poetry. Her voice haunts and comforts me.

[Roxanne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not my favorite of Claudia's books, but still strong.