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losethegirl's review
hopeful
reflective
sad
slow-paced
4.0
This book was recommended to me by Storygraph, and I wasn't disappointed in the least. While it wasn't my favourite in terms of style, the poetic voice was incredible. This was a quick read, and was a really great first post-breakup read.I would definitely recommend this book to anyone grappling with mixed feelings about their past relationships.
pattydsf's review
4.0
Artifact
For three years you lived in your house
just as it was before she died: your wedding
portrait on the mantel, her clothes hanging
in the closet, her hair still in the brush.
You have told me that you gave it all away
then, sold the house, keeping the confirmation’
cross she wore, her name in cursive chased
on the gold underside, your ring in the same
box, those photographs you still avoid,
and the quilt you spread on your borrowed bed –
small things. Months after we met, you told me she had
made it, after we slept already beneath its loft
and thinning, ravled pattern, as though beneath
her shadow, moving with us, that dark, that soft.
It has been awhile since I read this book, so I went looking on the internet for some of Emerson’s poetry. I hope to stay married to my first husband, so divorce and remarriage would not be in my future. She wrote so well – she makes me understand some circumstances that I have never had – one of the reasons I read.
I wish I had taken the time to hear Emerson read – poetry is always better spoken rather than read.
For three years you lived in your house
just as it was before she died: your wedding
portrait on the mantel, her clothes hanging
in the closet, her hair still in the brush.
You have told me that you gave it all away
then, sold the house, keeping the confirmation’
cross she wore, her name in cursive chased
on the gold underside, your ring in the same
box, those photographs you still avoid,
and the quilt you spread on your borrowed bed –
small things. Months after we met, you told me she had
made it, after we slept already beneath its loft
and thinning, ravled pattern, as though beneath
her shadow, moving with us, that dark, that soft.
It has been awhile since I read this book, so I went looking on the internet for some of Emerson’s poetry. I hope to stay married to my first husband, so divorce and remarriage would not be in my future. She wrote so well – she makes me understand some circumstances that I have never had – one of the reasons I read.
I wish I had taken the time to hear Emerson read – poetry is always better spoken rather than read.
xterminal's review
4.0
Claudia Emerson, Late Wife (Louisiana State University Press, 2005)
I've had very little patience with review-writing for the past six weeks or so, and thus I let this review go unconscionably long (I finished the book on April 30th and am writing this on June 10th). Thus, I've forgotten most of the phrases I was turning over in my mind. I do know, however, they all involved heaping a great deal of praise on Late Wife, Claudia Emerson's most recent book and the winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. I often find myself wondering what the judges were thinking giving the prize to book X instead of book Y; not in this case. The details may be a little fuzzy in my head this far after the fact, but the book itself is pure gold, that much I remember. Emerson has a wonderful eye for detail and that all-too-rare quality in a poet of not letting the story get in the way of the description:
“I'd run that course/so many times I imagined myself/a goat encircling an invisible stake//of the baseball diamond's off-season/desolation, scoreboard blank before/the lightening sky.” (“The Practice Cage”)
That, right there, is some language, folks. This is a book you want to read. Likely to be on my ten best reads of the year list. **** ½
I've had very little patience with review-writing for the past six weeks or so, and thus I let this review go unconscionably long (I finished the book on April 30th and am writing this on June 10th). Thus, I've forgotten most of the phrases I was turning over in my mind. I do know, however, they all involved heaping a great deal of praise on Late Wife, Claudia Emerson's most recent book and the winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. I often find myself wondering what the judges were thinking giving the prize to book X instead of book Y; not in this case. The details may be a little fuzzy in my head this far after the fact, but the book itself is pure gold, that much I remember. Emerson has a wonderful eye for detail and that all-too-rare quality in a poet of not letting the story get in the way of the description:
“I'd run that course/so many times I imagined myself/a goat encircling an invisible stake//of the baseball diamond's off-season/desolation, scoreboard blank before/the lightening sky.” (“The Practice Cage”)
That, right there, is some language, folks. This is a book you want to read. Likely to be on my ten best reads of the year list. **** ½
aoutrance's review
4.0
We travel through our narrator's unhappy marriage into the aftermath of her husband's affair, the divorce and finding who she is again without the nameless first husband. It culminates into the life she has with a new husband, who is the widower to the titular late wife.
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