80 pages / 6.00 x 9.00 inches / no illustrations
In Claude before Time and Space, her final collection, Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Claudia Emerson quietly but fiercely explores the themes of mortality and time.
In the first section of this book, “The Wheel,” Emerson uses a rural southern setting in poems that reflect on memory, the self, and relationships. In section two, “Bird Ephemera,” she explores historical figures—from an early naturalist and writer who raised her children in poverty to a small-town doctor. The collection concludes with a series of poems named after the poet’s father. This illuminating body of work displays a master poet at the height of her craft.
Claudia Emerson published six poetry collections, including Late Wife, Secure the Shadow, The Opposite House, and Impossible Bottle. Before her death in 2014, she was professor of English and a member of the creative writing faculty at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. Emerson served as poet laureate of Virginia and won numerous awards for teaching and writing, including the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
“In this elegant, posthumously published disquisition on the relationship between speech and silence, Emerson allows all that is left unsaid to complicate her skillful renderings of grief, mortality, and transcendence.”—Publishers Weekly
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