Pinion: An Elegy

by Claudia Emerson

In this eloquent long poem, Claudia Emerson employs the voices of two family members on a small southern farm to examine the universal complexities of place, generation, memory, and identity. Alternating between the voices of Preacher and Sister, Pinion is narrated by the younger, surviving sister, Rose, in whose memory the now-gone family and farm vividly live “In the dream that recurs, like a bird returning, the place is still as it was―as though they went away, years ago, fully intending to be back by first dark.”

Sister tells of her observances in day-to-day life in the 1920s and her struggle to take care of her father, grown brothers, and Rose―“the change-of-life baby”―after the death of her “The hens had hidden their heads beneath / their wings; they blinded themselves as I dusted / the kneading bowl with flour sifted fine as silk, and so / I disappeared as I sank my fists into it.” Preacher feels keenly the burden of running the farm and fears being the last one to live on the “I was held fast there, pinioned, not / dying, growing numb and light, wait-crazed / and finally calm.” Both wrestle with a desire for independence and the duty to home they are bound to by birth; neither marries or leaves.

Pinion is ultimately a wrenching elegy that Rose creates. She is the one who escaped, only to realize “I survive them all, but I find I have become the house they keep.”

Genres: Poetry

55 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 2002

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]

Claudia Emerson's 2002 collection, Pinion, is a book length narrative poem (really a series of similarly themed poems) that employs the voices of three family members – Preacher, Sister, and Rose – who all lived on a tobacco farm in the 1920s. Emerson plows some familiar American Literature turf, with her postage-stamp-of-earth examination of time and place. Hawthorne and Faulkner – with their own shadow filled preoccupation with the past (and its influence on the present and future) – come immediately to mind. But they were writers of fiction. Where Emerson succeeds is in her creation of a poem that has the density and power of a well-written novel. She achieves her success through fully imagined voices – voices, which given the rural setting, recall As I Lay Dying. The reader must keep in mind that these are reimagined voices filtered through a grown Rose walking through her vacant house many years later, for it was the birth of Rose that set into motion the end of way a life:

My memory of them is this flawed
creation; in it, they say what they could not – or would not say to
me. I was the change-of-life baby, coming late to them, my sister
old enough to be my mother, our brothers' voices heavy as their boots,
their backs rigid, closed doors. My birth began our mother's death.

The most memorable figure in the poem is "Preacher," Rose and Sister's brother. His name is meant to recall the same-named figure from Ecclesiastes – King James Version. Over the years, he acquires that biblical figure's ironical and resigned tone. In "Asunder," Preacher is still a young man, and wild forces clash within him. Primary is resentment, even disgust, at his father, as his mother screams nearby, giving birth yet again:

We were all gotten in that raw silence
and came to be with measured vengeance.
I can still see him, resolute, between
the spread legs of a plow, and how
he looked getting me.

To Preacher, his father, due to the numbing and grinding cycles of life on the farm, seems no more than a farm animal himself. Recalling his mother's earlier childhood warning that he was growing, despite his name, to be like his father, Preacher makes a vow:

No. There would be no more voices born
thin as if with mourning.

Mixed with Preacher's fury is desire, – a disordered desire for a maturing Sister with whom he shares a room in the old farm house. His anger and unease have no other outlet given the closed world of the farm. In the poem "Curing Time," Emerson paints Preacher's inner black and white Night-of-the-Hunter division beautifully as he works at night hanging tobacco:

My fists appeared, disappeared, in the rising
light of a wasted moon.
Sister's breasts waxed
against it; she was that familiar to me.
There used to be no tide in her. I feared
this changeling who strung bright leaves, her hands
quick and flying. I straddled the beams high
in the swollen gut of the barn, and her laughter
beat past the low rectangle of light – a swallow,
it sought this hollow dusk. Later, straddling
the mule, I knew her laugh in the soundless
distance by her head thrown back, her mouth
filled the sky.

Here Sister is portrayed as a dream that is not the hard-working day to day flesh and blood reality. Further, significant to this scene, but also throughout the collection, is the presence of a swallow. Birds are ever-present in Pinion, often appearing as elliptical glimpses – such as the flash of a wing, or a hawk diving into a field. As metaphor, meaning shifts, depending on the kind of bird (for example: swallow vs. crow). Here, Ecclesiastes 12:4-5 (with its birds) seems to apply to Preacher's state, with its contradictory rising to the sound of a bird in "Curing Time," and the falling of desire, crushingly so, in subsequent poems. A life of such back and forth signals from God eventually leaves Preacher "too old for omen." Cycles without escape, even in faith, are unescapable for Preacher. Transcendence is overshadowed by death – as it always has been. This narrow truth, as embraced by Preacher, is also his tragedy. There is no room for hope, given the boundaries of his existence.

Preacher's rage turns inward – at himself. In the poem "For Sister" he considers suicide and murder:

I caressed my name carved in the stock,
sought the rib pairing the barrels and thought
I would swallow that bored lie and be changed.
I would extract my name– tooth and ragged
root – from her mouth.

However, Preacher's lust gives way to what may be the first religious stirrings – stirrings that create a vision of a very personal hell to accompany such contemplated acts:

And what if for
all time all I could taste were bluing, gun
metal, grief, the scent of her on my sleeve.

This fear grows into a fuller understanding in "Pinion," where Preacher is pinned beneath a tractor. As he lies trapped, a very different messenger from the earlier swallow arrives:

A lone crow landed on the tractor tire,
and it turned with him, devolving. He looked
at me and spoke, "Be quick now about it,
before the others hear."

For Preacher, a kind of wisdom comes out of this dark encounter, but it is one rooted in the Old Testament. The retributive God of Ecclesiastes is now in place. Preacher sees a death-dominated world. Given the harsh surroundings and experiences of his life, along with his volatile temperament, an-eye-for-an-eye universe fits his outlook like a glove.

Sister is the other main voice in this narrative. Hers is a different kind of voice. Patience, long-suffering, and the ability to love are her virtues. To some extent, she is an earth mother in contrast to Preacher's fire from the sky intensity. The day-to-day details of Sister's life, and her willingness to subsume that life, are reflected by Emerson as diary entries:

The guineas had hidden their heads beneath
their wings; they blinded themselves as I dusted
the kneading bowl with flour sifted fine as silk, and so
I disappeared as I sank my fists into it.

("Fine as Silk")

The simple line ending "and so" reflects perfectly Sister's duty-bound goodness. In the same poem, filled with baking details, Sister notes that she, given her mother's age and health, will have to raise the child:

I listened, heard only the yeast
murmur in its bowl a cold lazy bowl.
I rolled up my sleeves and floured my hands
to punch it down, what was risen pale and full
as her belly swelling even now, the house
heavy with grown men. It would be mine
to raise . . .

Emerson's return to Preacher (though time is not linear in Pinion) finds an older, death haunted man. His relationship with another brother, Nate, a fiddle playing wild man, shows Preacher hardened by experience. In "Baiting," the division between the two is signaled in a conversation / argument over man's lot on this earth. Preacher's lack of concern over the Resurrection is consistent with the all-is-vanity drone of Ecclesiastes. It is wisdom, but incomplete, lacking of compassion:

"Man has no advantage over the beasts," I said;
he wrenched open that jaw, disputed me.
Then he reversed her on a board, and her inner
skin showed white – exposing no secret
after all – already something unto itself,
cleansed against what lay now in the dust and drew
fat, black flies. "For the fate of the sons of men
and the fate of beasts is the same." And he answered,
"This is the only resurrection."
He could not
frighten me then because I believed he was
lost.

Nate is not just a fun-loving fiddle player, he is also cruel, a torturer of animals. As Nate later lays dying, begging for Preacher to kill him, Preacher recalls an incident where Nate tried to drown a thrush in a rain barrel. Preacher's righteous anger is also joined to an act of mercy – for a bird:

I watched
you weight the thrush cupped in your hands, sink
it in the rain barrel, in the deep, false measure
of falling weather, saw the fear rise
in bronze eyes, and the wing stirred wake claim
flight in the wrong medium, and I turned,
grabbed a tobacco stick, and flayed your cap
from your scalp, your scalp from your bone, aiming
for the coiled quick of you when I failed, plunged
my arms in the water instead and saved
the thrush, hurled it back at the stunned sky,
and the wing-scud marked that bitter rain's
second fall. We were bathed in it.
Did you hear
at dusk the thrush's eloquence unchanged?

There's a hard twist to this question, a sharp rebuke of Nate for his wrongly lived life. Preacher tells Nate to think of himself now in that rain barrel and to look on Preacher's face above. Here Preacher's assumption of God's role as Judge is shocking, particularly so after the tender mercy shown the bird. Preacher's faith occupies a landscape drawn in clear lines. Nate has spent a life-time crossing those lines. Preacher has no comfort to offer a brother.

The last section of the collection is Sister's. In a very different "Curing Time," the child Rose makes her first appearance. The contrast with Preacher's "Curing Time"– with its moonlit dreamscape – is telling. In Sister's version, the real relationship between the three is implicitly suggested in a simple (daytime) observation of a child and a worm:

Rose appeared
holding a tobacco worm, bloated green,
and waited for me to watch while she
pulled off its head – the head of a prophet
hard-sought, hated, but much heeded.

Like Preacher, however, Sister also lives in a world of omens. In "The Deer," Sister, upon seeing a dog carrying the jawbone of a deer up to the porch, senses the shadow of death at work within her.

The jawbone
lay time-scoured, a clean offering. Detached,
it had been what mine was – the cradle
of the tongue – and its last bed. I knew
then I bore in me the form of this slow
migration, the turn to the tropic of bone.

This peaceful acceptance of mortality by Sister is a different kind of response than Preacher's. In the collection's last two poems, Sister turns to poem as prayer (truly the elegy in Pinion's title) that also incorporates in equal measure, remembrance and hope. Both remembrance and hope supply the backward and forward looking balance missing from Preacher's sections. In "On the Day She Is Spoken For" Sister sings a tender song of hope for Rose that foresees Rose as a vehicle for both their future desires. Again, Emerson employs, fittingly, the boundary clearing image of a bird – a swallow:

You were the door

I could unboard, and over the threshold
you entered the wing I dreamed for me,
greater by far than the house, like the swallow's
wing, longer than its sleek and cloven body,

so that you remained all day aloft,
away, far swifter even than the hawk.

The collection's final poem, "Sister's Dream of the Empty Wing," closes with Sister now beyond time, walking rooms both familiar and new, just as Rose opened the collection with her own walk through the old farm house. A circle has been closed. In Pinion there is a place where love and memory do join, just as Sister and sister can indeed reunite. Emerson is a wise poet who knows the necessity of the remembering, always hopeful heart:

Through room after room
I follow the mockingbird, mocking
no other, calling out with original
voice the generation that speaks also
in me, in this wing that leaves the house
behind it forgotten – where I will
not wake, the cage of my ribs swept clean.




(A slightly different version of this review (complete with indents) appeared in the Avatar Review.

[William · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really, really compelling and complex 55pg long poem. This is a poetry book that non-poetry people would still really enjoy because of the narrative poetry form and structure.

[Sam · Rating 5 out of 5]

This brief collection, organized around a family history, blew me away. It's quite distinct from Emerson's later, award-winning work in Late Wife. These are long-lined, detail-filled persona poems. There isn't the restrained or soft-spoken tone common in Emerson's later work. Pinion's poems grab you and don't let go. This work focuses on the south that has been lost, similar to Secure the Shadow but prior. We are still dealing with a south untouched by the post-World War years. The land features largely, and the labor that goes into making a life out of farming. You feel the ups and downs of agriculture very acutely, and how what has been worked so hard for can easily be lost.

The narrative thread remains strong throughout the entire collection, but doesn't feel overdone. This points to the future development that Emerson went through as a poet, which led to her later acclaim, but is certainly praise-worthy in its own right.

[Owen]

This work, more than a lot of others, has taught me much about how to avoid intellectualizing every bit of a poem, and instead just let it tell me what it wants to say. It balanced sharp imagery with the ache of loneliness; I only know pieces of the characters' lives but I feel that I know them well, all the same.

I believe I bought this book in college, when I took a class from Claudia Emerson. I should've read it then. Perhaps I wasn't ready for it, but then again perhaps college is wasted on the college-aged.

[Diann Blakely]

Claudia Emerson’s poems are redolent with our regional soil and its seasonal varieties: the fragrances of raw spring earth; summer-mud lusciousness; frosted, autumnal fields stripped to dirt after harvest; and the oddly fecund smell of ground hollowed and deepened for a midwinter funeral. Indeed, there’s a lot of dead chill in Emerson’s work. In “Cleaning the Graves,” a poem from PHARAOH, PHAROAH, her 1997 collection, she describes herself as “descended from...loss.” Her grandmother was “a woman who trapped / snowbirds for potpie, who let hens nest / in the kitchen in freezing weather / so they would lay better, who could wring their heads / from their bodies in one motion”; her mother tells the author that her blood too is that cold, “but you don’t know it yet, never / had hard times.” Emerson Andrews’ South is tobacco country, once composed of small farms and now owned by corporations, its inhabitants mostly fled to cities but feeling that loss of place like the ache of an amputated limb—not because that place was one they loved, but because it defined them. Her second volume, PINION, spoken in the alternating voices of a brother and sister, takes these themes even deeper, but neither this book nor PHARAOH, PHARAOH feels ultimately grim. Emerson’s language is gorgeous but reticent, aware, always, that it remains in service to a larger task: commemorating, even celebrating, her family and the hard ground from which it sprang.

[David Anthony Sam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Claudia Emerson's untimely death is still a great loss to those who love great poetry. In this epistolary collection of dramatic monologues from 2002 , Emerson toldthe story of a southern family, hinting at the deeper issues of their relationships while engaging us deeply in their experiences. Her language is always both simple and luminescent:

The second day, the creek
argued with the rain, grew bolder before
losing itself, overcoming the banks
that had defined it.

The older sister recalls defending a bird against the cruelty of her brother:

I turned,
grabbed a tobacco stick, and flayed your cap
from your scalp, your scalp from your bone, aiming
for the coiled quick of you when I failed, plunged
my arms in the water instead and saved
the thrush, hurled i back at the stunned sky...

The younger sister is given a voice in prose to introduce the journals and letters of her (presumably deceased) older siblings as she visits their abandoned home. So much goes on the white space as we read, so much is meant by what is subtly unsaid.

the cage of my ribs swept clean.

[Anthony Salazar · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really liked this selection of poetry. So much, I decided to focus my senior thesis on this book. I guess what initially interested me was the way Emerson's work resembles the works by William Faulkner. Also, I really liked the idea of the generation of siblings being trapped within the farm (almost like the Compson family), with the exception of Rose, of course. Since all of the siblings are dead when Rose speaks for them, I guess the question that I keep pondering over is: who is elegizing who? This is definitely a great work of lyrical poetry. I just hope that throughout the years many come to realize its awesomeness!

[Gabriel · Rating 5 out of 5]

The title is carefully and accurately chosen. All the aspects of the word 'pinion' are important. And it is an elegy. It is a mourning for what-was told in the language of what-is and what-is-remembered. The ghost echoes of a family, of a lifetime, of a farm. Each character's voice rising and twining into a picture that cuts deep into the heart with its realism, its truth, its terrible beauty.

I return to it again and again.

[Carolyne Mistake · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pinion is what some people term a povel, a book of poetry that works as a novel. This book is a work of fiction, a collection that takes place in the earlier 1900s on a farm. The narrator is the last living sibling, but she tells the story from the voices of her brother Preacher and her sister who is only ever called Sister.

[Kathleen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stunning, gripping.

Borrowed from a friend whose mother worked in tobacco farming, as do characters in this book of riveting poems!

"Pinion," the title poem, would not let me go. The bird wing of the cover comes home in the closing poems.

I had borrowed Emerson's book Late Wife from the same friend. It's good to have friends who like poetry!!

[Sarah]

Pinion: An Elegy (Southern Messenger Poets) by Claudia Emerson (2002)

[Nicki · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I grow up, I want to write like Claudia Emerson