{"id":145,"date":"2013-12-29T21:16:27","date_gmt":"2013-12-30T02:16:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/?p=145"},"modified":"2013-12-29T21:16:27","modified_gmt":"2013-12-30T02:16:27","slug":"review-of-secure-the-shadow-by-claudia-emerson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/?p=145","title":{"rendered":"Review of Secure the Shadow by Claudia Emerson"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Emerson<\/a><\/p>\n

Claudia Emerson. Secure the Shadow. <\/i>Louisiana State University Press, 2012. 70 pgs. $18.95<\/p>\n

Reviewed by Lynn Domina<\/p>\n

Secure the Shadow, <\/i>Claudia Emerson\u2019s fifth collection of poetry, consists of elegantly restrained meditations on memory, loss, death\u2014of a father, a brother, anonymous strangers, various animals\u2014those subjects poets consider again and again. Of course, all grief reminds us of our own mortality, as Hopkins insists in \u201cSpring and Fall\u201d and Odysseus demonstrates when he lives to hear a story of his own death. Yet knowledge of our own mortality needn\u2019t diminish the authenticity of our memorials for others; the intensity of our grief might instead verify our willingness to forget the self. Although many of the poems in Secure the Shadow<\/i> incorporate a first person speaker, that speaker remains contemplative, inviting the reader to consider what she has considered, to perceive what she has perceived. Reading this collection, our identity expands as we find ourselves among a community\u2014of the living and, yes, of the dead.<\/p>\n

The title poem describes several daguerreotypes of deceased children, \u201cSecure the Shadow\u201d a slogan to encourage the production of images. If the body decomposes, the image can remain. The instruction to \u201csecure\u201d a \u201cshadow\u201d is provocative, for a shadow, though a noun, is barely a thing. A shadow is something that is not, yet it testifies to that which is. The children in these daguerreotypes are strangers to the speaker, yet she notices their detail, their individuality. Some of the details will seem bizarre to many modern readers: the corpse of a girl dead nine days, preserved on a \u201cdesperate bed of ice\u201d; the corpse of another girl holding a live cat; the corpses of children who have \u201ctheir hands tied as though in bondage; \/ this is, the photographer\u2019s notes instruct, \/ to prevent displacement,\u2026\u201d The images suggest that though each child has become anonymous, each life nevertheless had meaning, and some meaning, if not the same meaning, returns through the poem. In the last section, Emerson suggests that the images eventually collapse into types, for the poses and props repeat themselves, \u201crooms and windows, cradles and caskets.\u201d The poem turns outward, for just as the types of these portraits are limited, so also are our ways of seeing: \u201cthe light \/ changes, fades, is lost, the pane\u2014the lens\u2014 \/ darkening from glass to mirror, until \/ the substance of the eye sees itself \/ outside the self, and then can look no further.\u201d The reader, also, seeing his or her future in these daguerreotypes, can see no further, yet it is empathy rather than solipsism that enables us to see \u201coutside the self.\u201d \u201cSecure the Shadow\u201d rests in compassion, a trustworthy trait in any speaker.<\/p>\n

Two of the other poems have particularly stuck with me in the months I\u2019ve been thinking about this book. Neither is as long as \u201cSecure the Shadow,\u201d but both explore the relationship of grief and identity. They are stylistically similar, written in couplets with indented second lines, as are nearly all of the poems in the book. This structure works particularly well in \u201cNamesake,\u201d a nineteen line poem of nine couplets with a single final line, nineteen lines but only two sentences; the first sentence ends in the middle of line ten. Although Emerson frequently relies on this form, \u201cNamesake\u201d illustrates how flexible the form can be and how adept Emerson is with the line. The poem opens this way: \u201cWhile still a child, he sensed his name\u2014 \/ spoken, shouted, whispered, laughed, and called \/\/ and called and called\u2014was not fully his, \/ having been first his grandfather\u2019s\u2026\u201d The break between lines two and three, which is also the first stanza break, illustrates how Emerson complicates meaning by exploiting form. The second line seems simply a list of verbs affiliated with speaking, but then we have \u201cand called and called\u201d to begin line three, repeating \u201ccalled\u201d and emphasizing it, so that we pay attention, not only to the insistence of \u201ccalled\u201d\u2014which will be referred to later as the boy sometimes refuses to heed its imperative\u2014but also to additional meanings of \u201ccall.\u201d To be called is not only to be identified, but also to be set apart. This boy\u2019s calling is not his own because his name belongs to his grandfather, who died when his mother was a child. This boy is called, but only because the other one, who was also called, cannot answer. The boy can therefore never be certain of his calling.\u00a0 Without the line and stanza break where it occurs, readers would not be as inclined to ruminate over this verb, recognizing its depth. Calling him, his mother longs for her own father, and so the boy experiences her disappointment when he answers. Experiencing himself as disappointment, the boy \u201ccould not know whom to rage against, \/\/ the one who called, the one who would not come.\u201d Other lines in this poem read as units of meaning that augment the sentence\u2019s grammatical meaning, and Emerson varies the rhythm within the lines through phrasing and caesuras so that the music remains engaging and even becomes surprising.<\/p>\n

Another poem, a particularly short one called simply \u201cI,\u201d also explores the relationship between identity and grief, this time through the mind of one who can no longer express his thoughts. He can say one word only, one syllable, one vowel: \u201che tries again \/ and again, repeating the long flat i\u2014 \/\/ <\/i>a needle deepening in the groove\u2014until \/ his voice registers something beyond grief, \/\/ disbelief, the word having returned \/ to sound\u2014oblivious elegy, that pure vowel.\u201d The single sound, the first person singular pronoun, is elegy. The man is not yet dead, but he could not be more clearly mortal. Like \u201cNamesake,\u201d \u201cI\u201d is written in couplets, though this time as a single sentence. Nearly all of the lines are enjambed, so the poem is propelled forward more quickly than \u201cNamesake,\u201d though again the rhythm varies from line to line. It\u2019s a beautiful poem, and it\u2019s heart wrenching.<\/p>\n

Secure the Shadow<\/i> is stylistically and thematically coherent. Many of the poems are ambitious\u2014we read, pause, reread. The poems consistently reveal a depth of meaning that compels rereading. I am anxious for Emerson\u2019s next book, and yet also not anxious, for the poems here provide enough to engage me until then.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Claudia Emerson. Secure the Shadow. Louisiana State University Press, 2012. 70 pgs. $18.95 Reviewed by Lynn Domina Secure the Shadow, Claudia Emerson\u2019s fifth collection of poetry, consists of elegantly restrained meditations on memory, loss, death\u2014of a father, a brother, anonymous strangers, various animals\u2014those subjects poets consider again and again. Of course, all grief reminds us […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-145","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-areviewaweek"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=145"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":147,"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145\/revisions\/147"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=145"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=145"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=145"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}