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Soul diver

Pedestal for a poet: Claudia Emerson wins the Pulitzer

Date published: 4/19/2006

Soul diver

"FOR A DISTINGUISHED VOLUME of original verse by an American author," the 2006 Pulitzer Prize goes to Claudia Emerson, associate professor of English at the University of Mary Washington. Though we have little practice in receiving such wonderful tidings, we're pretty sure "Way to go" won't cut it.

So how about this: All Fredericksburg rejoices at having among us one able to reach into her life and extract the essence of what it means to love, to lose, and to love again, to distill those deep feelings into black letters so artfully arranged on white paper that in reading them a stranger is pierced--by understanding.

To be a poet in 21st-century America is to intentionally half-drown. While others swim toward some far-off golden isle--note the hoopla over the likes of "American Idol"--poets dive deep into the unfathomed waters of their souls to capture in words what the rest of us relegate to lagoons of denial. They thereby draw us into the depths of our own hearts.

Claudia Emerson in "Late Wife" poignantly reflects on the ending of her first marriage and the discovery of a new love with a man who also has suffered loss. Weaving the threads of divorce and death into another living tapestry takes reflection and grace and a persistent hope. These Ms. Emerson displays in abundance.

Her work is awash with images from nature. On opening the silverware drawer in an old house, she finds an unwelcome guest:

the snake lay coiled, brooding

on its bed of edges--blades and tines--

the hard bone handles, a wedding gift

from my mother's aunt.

Grieving her first marriage, she says,

I confess that last house was the coldest

I kept. In it, I became formless as fog

These observations, so simple yet stirring, move the reader unconsciously from the physical to the transcendent. Her depictions of everything from cancer to a furnace breakdown are surgically spare and precise as the etchings a laser makes on glass. No longer will you look at spiders, "their egg sacs hung like soft, spun pearls," or a mirror, a "lesser, backward window," in quite the same way.

Winning the Pulitzer is a high honor. Nominated by her publisher, Louisiana State University Press, Ms. Emerson now mounts a pedestal on which the likes of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Stephen Vincent Benet, Archibald MacLeish, and Robert Frost have stood. Bravo--and thank you, Professor, for a great Fredericksburg moment.

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Date published: 4/19/2006