Synopsis

Poet Claudia Emerson begins Figure Studies with a twenty-fie-poem lyric sequence called "All Girls School," offering intricate iews of a richly imagined boarding school for girls. Whether focused on a lesson, a teacher, or the girls themseles as they collectiely "school"-or refuse to-the poems explore ways girls are "trained" in the broadest sense of the word.

"Gossips," the second section, is a shorter sequence narrated by women as they talk about other women in a ariety of isolations; these poems, told from the outside looking in, highlight a speculatie oicing of all the gossips cannot know. In "Early Lessons," the third section, children narrate as they also obsere similarly solitary women, the children's innocence allowing them to see in farther than the gossips can. The fourth section offers studies of women and men in situations in which gender, with all of its complexities, figures powerfully.

The follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize-winning collection Late Wife, Figure Studies upholds Emerson's place among contemporary poetry's elite.

When the only ladies' dress shop closed,
she was left on the street for trash, unsalageable,

one arm missing, lost at the shoulder, one leg
at the hip. But she was wearing a blue-sequined negligee

and blonde wig, so they helped themseles to her
on a lark-drunken impulse-and for years kept her

leaning in a corner, beside an attic
window, rendered inisible. The dusk

was also perpetual in the garage below,
punctuated only by bare bulbs hung close

oer the engines. An oily grime coated
the walls, and a decade of calendars promoted

stock-car driers, women in datedswimsuits,
een their bodies out of fashion. Radio distorted

there; cigarette smoke moaned, the pedal steel
conceding to that place a greater, echoing

sorrow. So, lame, forgotten prank, she remained,
back turned foreer to the dark storage

behind her, gaze leeled just aboe
anyone's who could hae looked up

to mistake in the cast of her face fresh longing-
her expression still reluctant figure for it.

-"The Mannequin aboe Main Street Motors"

KLIATT - Jim Beschta

Figure Studies is rooted in the fundamentals of fine writing: word economy, solid imagery with distinguishing detail, clear narration, implication that extends the work into the reader's imagination beyond the final written word. Vivid description lies at the base of its success. In Emerson's hands, however, description is a fundamental tool, one that underpins, for example, the introduction of accessible narrative. "The woodpile on the porch dwindled/to its last layer; she had not replenished it//for a month and could see beyond it windblown ice/in the shed where the axe angled Excalibur-like,//frozen in the wood." Note also here, on a secondary level, the poet's control of sound and phrasing. The precision of specificity, the artist's eye paradoxically objective and interpretive, also serves as the foundation of the suggestion so essential to all artistic forms. In "Piano Fire," Emerson says, "We watched the keys catch, furious and all/at once, heard in the fire a musiclike relief//when the several tons of tension let go, heat/becoming wind in our faces." The ultimate insight of the passage is embedded in the narration and elicited from the individual reader through his/her empathy with and interpretation of the event. Centered on female characters and experiences, this clearly organized collection is universal in its appeal and insight. Figure Studies reinforces Emerson's position as a significant voice in contemporary American poetry and proves to be a worthy follow-up to her Pulitzer Prize-winning Late Wife. Reviewer: Jim Beschta

Biography

Claudia Emerson is also the author of Late Wife, winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize, and Pharaoh, Pharaoh. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Southern Review, Shenandoah, TriQuarterly, New England Review, and other journals. The recipient of a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Virginia Commission for the Arts, she holds the Arrington Distinguished Chair in Poetry at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia.