Though she received the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for a collection of deeply personal poems, one of Claudia Emerson’s finest gifts was for inhabiting the voices of others, creating essentially a Spoon RiverAnthology for rural Virginia.
Here in the stern dark house Of loam, the trees stretch boughs Of roots that hunger downward, roots that keep A pact with silence, a covenant with sleep. Under the leaf mould, under The intricate small wonder Of fern and blossom, the roots go down to [...]
BLACK trees against a marble hill Of January snow declare New England to whoever will Behold them darkly standing there. Unveiled of leaves, bereft of sun Save now and then a grudging dole, They stand like berserks every one, Denied the berserks' was [...]
The feast-huddle explodes when I approach, a gray fox remains, whitening to bone. The risen wait in the limbs above for me to glance the marker, pass on.
The poems of air are slowly dying; too light for the page, too faint, too far away, the ones we've called The Moon, The Stars, The Sun, sink into the sea or slide behind the cooling trees at the field's edge. The grave of light is everywhere.
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