In this eloquent long poem, Claudia Emerson employs the voices of two family members on a small southern farm to examine the universal complexities of place, generation, memory, and identity. Alternating between the voices of Preacher and Sister, Pinion is narrated by the younger, surviving sister, Rose, in whose memory the now-gone family and farm vividly live “In the dream that recurs, like a bird returning, the place is still as it was―as though they went away, years ago, fully intending to be back by first dark.” Sister tells of her observances in day-to-day life in the 1920s and her struggle to take care of her father, grown brothers, and Rose―“the change-of-life baby”―after the death of her “The hens had hidden their heads beneath / their wings; they blinded themselves as I dusted / the kneading bowl with flour sifted fine as silk, and so / I disappeared as I sank my fists into it.” Preacher feels keenly the burden of running the farm and fears being the last one to live on the “I was held fast there, pinioned, not / dying, growing numb and light, wait-crazed / and finally calm.” Both wrestle with a desire for independence and the duty to home they are bound to by birth; neither marries or leaves. Pinion is ultimately a wrenching elegy that Rose creates. She is the one who escaped, only to realize “I survive them all, but I find I have become the house they keep.”
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...
