"The poems in this dark, wholly absorbing book hover around absence, the absence left by death, by grief, by the fading of childhood memory, by the decline of a small community, and by the larger, inevitable sweep of time. The book begins in specific time and place and spirals out to vaster attitudes and claims, to reference Dickinson, a presiding spirit in this book. And yet, the absence conjured here is never emptiness: it is a thing itself, a firm reality that happens to defy words-almost. I have read and re-read this haunting book and will continue to do so. It mesmerizes and enchants, and convinces the reader that one is in the presence of a master and a deeply human poet."-Maurice Manning, author of The Common Man
"In her deft, unflinching, and fiercely gorgeous new collection, The Opposite House, Claudia Emerson exposes what language will salvage and what remains unsalvageable. Where 'the fact/ of every door/remains/ reference to/an antecedent made/vague-' we find clarity: in a space both familiar and alternate, like that of the elegized 'Telephone Booth,' 'robbed of confession, apology, despair.' Whether in spider eggs blasted into space 'to see if they would hatch,' or in an embalmer's passion for his work, 'art-far beyond balm-levitation, almost/that immaculate a suspense, exact/ and abstract, the thing itself made other,/ italicized,' one finds throughout, the threat of oblivion set hard against our longing. Emerson, like 'The Ocularist,' becomes 'architect/not of form/but of function,/not of object/but of the seen-/self, enticing it not/to look away."-Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, author of Open Interval
★ 02/16/2015
Each poem in this last work from the late Emerson, who won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Late Wife, is a finely detailed portrait. Her subjects include everything from inanimate objects (a drive-in movie theater, wisdom teeth), archetypical characters (the middle child, the aunt, a woman with Alzheimer’s, a greengrocer), and more specific figures such as those found in her poem “Dr. Crawford Long, Discoverer of the First Surgical Anesthetic, and the Case of Isam Bailey.” Emerson is an intense, intelligent, and authoritative poet who expresses herself through spare, sharp lines that burst with emotion. She also understands the interplay between language and her very human subjects, as when she writes of an old telephone operator, “All morning she has answered, ever pleasant,/ the one no one wants, but must reach for.” As for her greengrocer: “Customers handle all of what he has displayed,/ worried, he has come to think, skeptical,/ the way they might be about a child.” Emerson’s sensitive and loving treatment of all her poetic material, her precise and provocative descriptions of her subjects’ thoughts and emotions, and her excellent use of language calls for the highest of accolades. It’s a brilliant and original work. (Mar.)
