Secure the Shadow

By Claudia Emerson, UMW professor of English and Arrington Distinguished Chair in Poetry

Death comes calling in Claudia Emerson’s Secure the Shadow. But as the poetry collection – dedicated to the memory of her father and brother, who both died within a three-year span – delves into the darkness of demise, it also illuminates the idea of conservation.

It “may seem to be about death, the brother’s death, the father’s death, everyone’s death,” wrote Virginia Poet Laureate Kelly Cherry ’61. “Yet the poems themselves…are the poet’s brilliant argument for life.”

Emerson’s words explore cultural and historical aspects of dying through everything from a burning home to the slaughter of farm animals, and, most profoundly, through the loss of her own family members. But, as its title – an old ad for postmortem images – suggests, the work extols preservation, and the author pays homage to the children photographed in death who live on in dusty daguerreotypes.

“Photography is preservation…poetry is also preserving,” Emerson told UMW’s DTLT Today webcast. “The thing that’s always alive is the person who’s going to view it…the living eye moving around the figure or through the poem.”

Emerson, a former Virginia Poet Laureate whose six books include the Pulitzer Prize-winning Late Wife, has received fellowships from the Virginia Commission for the Arts, National Endowment for the Arts, and Library of Congress.

Published by Louisiana State University Press, February 2012