On Emerson's Impossible Bottle

On Emerson's Impossible Bottle Hastings Hensel (bio) Claudia Emerson. Impossible Bottle. LSU Press, 2015. "You are never out // of sight of the end of it," Claudia Emerson writes in "MRI," an early poem in Impossible Bottle, the second of her three posthumous collections, which also include The Opposite House (2015) and Claude Before Time and Space (2018). As with so many turns of phrase in her work—and she really is one of the great poets of phrase—Emerson is able to extract multiple layers of meaning from a well-known idiom. The speaker here is describing, by associative memory, a tunnel she once explored in western Maryland but also, literally, the MRI machine in which she actually lies and from which she speaks in the poem. Still, the vague pronoun reference—the "it"—is also clearly (paradoxically) life, and "the end of it" is, of course, death. Indeed, to read any poem by Claudia Emerson—even the poems from her debut collection, Pharaoh, Pharaoh (1991)—is to be within sight of death. Her second book, the long book-length poem Pinion, is subtitled "An Elegy"; her third book, the work for which she won the Pulitzer Prize, is the death-meditative Late Wife. Claudia Emerson, as many others have noted, is foremost (and supremely) an elegist. In Impossible Bottle the subject of the elegies, however, is mostly the poet herself. You cannot read these poems devoid of biographical context, nor do these poems invite you to do so—that is, you cannot not think about how Claudia Emerson wrote these poems during her battle with colon cancer, which ended her life too soon at the age 57, in 2014. (According to her editor at LSU Press, Mary Katherine Calloway, "IMPOSSIBLE BOTTLE was published after Claudia's death, but she [End Page 198] had completed all the editing. She knew she was ill, and we worked together to bring them out as quickly as possible.") But "Death," Wallace Stevens famously repeated in "Sunday Morning," "is the mother of beauty." And these poems—incessant as they are in their meditations on mortality—nevertheless embrace the wonder and joys of living, which for Emerson is often the physical world we can know through sight—or, better yet perhaps, through poetic vision. And the poems, thereby—as they have always been—are hauntingly beautiful. Their structure, more often than not, goes something like this: The thing observed gives rise to the knowledge of death, but the knowledge of death offers its own kind of celebration of the realities of the here and now, which is life. One could possibly argue that such an argument is, essentially, the argument of all great poetry (cf. "Ode to a Nightingale"), but it seems to me that, in order for the argument to have merit, the thing observed must be rendered with care, meticulousness, metaphor, precision, and music. Claudia Emerson is an imagist and metaphor-maker of the highest caliber, and the music of her poems is, and has always been, haunting—in the way the high, lonesome sound of old-time traditional music, which she loved, is haunting. Take, for instance, "Metastasis: Owl" in its entirety. (The title of every other poem in the first section, "Anatomies," of Impossible Bottle includes the word "Metastasis," as in "Metastasis: Chevron," "Metastasis: Owl," "Metastasis: English Ivy," and so on. By pairing a word of illness with a word of nature, Emerson finds the perfect coupling of abstraction and particularity, of death and life.) your brain the bewildered marginof this city its river from here you hearbelieve and cannot see you mistake a voiceat dusk for human or something ordinary untilthe hour escapes your ignorance to passover close enough for you to feelthe air it moves its sight poor majesticallyso as yours Notice the motifs, which run throughout Emerson's work, of integrating mind and nature, of absence and presence, of vision. (One could say her work meditates on vision as much as, or more than, even Oedipus Rex or King Lear or Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.) These themes find formal expression in the pauses in the middle of the lines—what...