The Opposite House by Claudia Emerson

Originally published in The Pleaides Book Review, Spring 2016

It is impossible to separate The Opposite House by Pulitzer Prize winner Claudia Emerson from its publication context – namely, that when the collection was in its final editorial stages, Emerson’s cancer had returned, and it was released three months after her death. This puts any reviewer in the difficult position of critically reading poems published posthumously by a beloved poet whose absence is still acutely felt in the community. Full disclosure: I had the pleasure of meeting Emerson in the summer of 2014 at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and though I did not know her well, her generosity of spirit and devotion to her craft was apparent. She delivered the conference’s opening reading, which included several poems that appear in this collection, and received a well-deserved standing ovation.

What a relief it is, then, that The Opposite House is a strong final offering, a fitting (albeit premature) concluding chapter to Emerson’s astonishing body of work. The collection takes its name from a Dickinson poem that also serves as epigraph for the collection: “There’s been a Death, in the Opposite House/As lately as Today—/I know it, by the numb look/Such Houses have—alway—.” This matter-of-fact, unsentimental attitude characterizes the tone of Emerson’s almost clinical exploration of death and the process of dying. To say the book is preoccupied with death would be an understatement – death occupies every corner, and the poems work relentlessly to pin it down, demystify it, drag it from the shadows. Macabre as this may sound, Emerson’s verse is grounded in a genuine curiosity, and her undertaking (fueled, perhaps, by the awareness of her own mortality) breathes new life into a tried-and-true subject.

The first of the three sections of the book comprises third-person narrative poems, several in blank verse. The omniscient speaker never reveals herself, as if keeping a respectful distance from the events being described, acting as an objective lens in order to capture things precisely as they are. This precision is reflected in Emerson’s diction, most notably when she invents adjectives, linking words together to arrive at the perfect image – smoke is “fog-close,” a nightgown is “sleep-thinned.”

The opening poem, “Ephemeris,” tells of a woman who has come home to die and slips in and out of lucidity, cared for by a daughter “she knows, and then does not.” The house is also both familiar and foreign; a hospital bed has replaced the breakfast table in the kitchen, and this uncanny image of a (death)bed in the wrong room recurs in later poems. Rather than fear, the old woman feels comforted by death’s approach, as she imagines “the hereafter a bed, the night/ to herself, rain percussive in the gutters—” and looks forward to being reunited with her middle child who died within a day of being born.

Emerson juxtaposes losses we might consider natural or inevitable (the “clumsy dying” of cicadas), with those that are decidedly not: trees felled by chainsaws, a cow struck by lightning, the phantom limb of a wounded veteran. The violence that often accompanies the end of life is graphically depicted in poems like “House Sparrows,” where children delight in throwing the birds’ eggs against the barn and watching them “explode into a constellation/ of watery stars,” and the final lines of “Entrance,” in which a woman recalls decapitating a snake with a paring knife when she was a girl. Brutality is somewhat subdued, however, by Emerson’s attention to form – the poems look tidy on the page, and the iambic pentameter provides a stately, funereal rhythm to her lines. Death may be gruesome, but it is never messy, preserved in these poems like the framed lace tapestry that the dying woman in “Linguist” gazes at, “its beauty patterned absence—kept inside/ the glass cabinets surrounding her.”

The tone shifts in “Early Elegies,” the book’s second section, and the only one Emerson titled. These eight poems, each eight lines long, wryly lament on the extinction of various objects, occupations, places, and practices. “Telephone Booth” unfolds in a single, sinewy sentence:
Its remains: a plexiglass crypt robbed
of confession, apology, despair, its half
of all conversation now a narrow
column of strictest clarity, a coinless
reliquary where the receiver dangles
like an unwatched hook, and the phonebook
hangs from its chain – obedient
to the numbered gravity of names.

Emerson employs a heavy dose of internal rhyme in this elegy and others; each reads like a miniature master class on poetic syntax and economy of language. Nostalgia creeps into “Cursive,” for who could prefer the “preformed fonts” of typeface to the “ornamental scripts” and “hairline serifs” of handwriting? Emerson even eulogizes smallpox, which “the world has certified itself rid of/ all but the argument: to eradicate or not/ the small stock of variola frozen.” (Interestingly, the disease manages to cheat death, infecting the scientist studying it and leaving her with a “discrete first pock.”)

Structurally, “Early Elegies” offers some welcome levity, as the last section of The Opposite House recalls the narrative intensity of the beginning of the book. Now, however, Emerson’s voice is more intimate, more urgent, as she inhabits the personas of historical figures such as Dr. Crawford Long, who discovered anesthesia, and Irene Virga Salafia, the wife of a Sicilian embalmer. Several of the poems have brief, cascading lines separated by white space, creating a fragmented effect very different from blocky blank verse and elegantly compact elegies. The title poem, “The Opposite House,” begins:

This place:
a cavernous warehouse
of houses
dismantled,
catalogued,
reordered here
according
to part-rendered-
particle—

This graveyard of used house-parts contains everything from bannisters and floorboards to doorknobs and window sills. Some of these abandoned objects, however, are resurrected; once resold, they become “re-made into/ the agelessness/ of someone else’s/ household-now.” This “transfiguring salvage” is a kind of salvation, a second chance.

Images of reincarnation and rebirth pervade the final poems of the collection. Emerson alludes explicitly to Lazarus in the last line of “Dr. Crawford Long, Discoverer of the First Surgical Anesthetic, and the Case of Isam Bailey,” and compares the deathlike sleep of anesthesia to being in the womb. Likewise, “Virginia Christian,” about the first woman sentenced to the electric chair in Virginia in 1912, insists that flipping the switch caused “the slow certain/ strike of/ conception,” whereupon
her grave
the bed where
she was born, the very
air, her first
drawn breath
the casting down
of a fistful of earth.
 

The ironic placement of “A Frontispiece” as the final poem further suggests that ends and beginnings are interchangeable. Perhaps dying is but a commencement, a threshold to be crossed. Ultimately, The Opposite House is a stark and stoic rumination on death, one that only someone facing it could provide.