Written by the winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, Pharaoh, Pharaoh is a meditation on time, memory, inheritance, and the irony of loss―loss of one’s land, of one’s past, of love itself. With senses keenly attuned to every nuance of light and landscape, Claudia Emerson Andrews invests her lines with a scriptural fire. She captures equally and with apparent effortlessness the bewilderment of the culturally bereft in the “stuttered eloquence” of an auctioneer and the evanescence of appearances in the image of a dying firefly “coughing up light.” In this postlapsarian pastoral of the modern Southeast, Andrews summons a cast of characters bound to times and places of desolation, yet unable to leave because it is that very desolation―the plagues, the scourges, the losses and heartbreak―that has defined them. Their collective cry of exultant despair is compressed in the astonishing final lines of “Plagues”: “Pharaoh, Pharaoh, as if there were something keeping us, as if we could be let go.” Andrews brings to these poems a vision so clear, so miraculously right, that the pages themselves seem suffused with the scents of sunlight and new-mown hay. Pharaoh, Pharaoh is a lovely, spellbinding reminder of what we discard, what we keep―and why.
Author
Born and raised in Chatham, Virginia, Claudia Emerson studied writing at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. Her poetry, steeped in the Southern Narrative tradition, bears the influences of Ellen Bryant Voigt, Betty Adcock, and William Faulkner. Of the collection Late Wife (2005), poet Deborah Pope observed, “Like the estranged lover in one of her poems who pitches horseshoes in the dark with preternatural precision, so Emerson sends her words into a different kind of darkness with steely exactness, their arc of perception over and over striking true.” Emerson’s volumes of poetry include Pharaoh, Pharaoh (1997); Pinion: An Elegy (2002); Late Wife (2005), which won the Pulitzer Prize; Figure Studies (2008); and Secure the Shadow (2012). Her honors include two additional Pulitzer Prize nominations as well as fellowships from the Library of Congress, the Virginia Commission for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2008 she was appointed poet laureate of Virginia, a two-year role. Emerson was poetry editor for the Greensboro Review and a contributing editor for Shenandoah. She taught at Washington and Lee University, Randolph-Macon Women’s College, and the University of Mary Washington. She died in 2014. From The Poetry Foundation website. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/c...
