Claude before Time and Space

Claude before Time and Space - Cover

Poems

by Claudia Emerson

Southern Messenger Poets

80 pages / 6.00 x 9.00 inches / no illustrations

ebook available

Poetry

Hardcover / 9780807167854 / February 2018
Paperback / 9780807167861 / February 2018

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.

Praise for Claude After Time and Space

“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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