Daringly realistic and artfully mediated by past and present, Claudia Emerson’s Secure the Shadow contains historical pieces as well as poems centering on the deaths of the poet’s brother and father. Emerson covers all aspects of the tragedies that, as Keats believed, contribute to our human collective of Soul-making, in which each death accrues into an immortal web of ongoing love and meaning for the living. Emerson’s unwavering gaze shows that loss cannot be eluded, but can be embraced in elegies as devastating as they are beautiful.

Claudia Emerson’s five books include Late Wife, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and most recently, Secure the Shadow. Emerson has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Library of Congress, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Former poet laureate of Virginia, she holds the Arrington Distinguished Chair in Poetry at the University of Mary Washington in Virginia.

Praise for Secure the Shadow

“Secure the Shadow is stylistically and thematically coherent. Many of the poems are ambitious—we read, pause, reread. The poems consistently reveal a depth of meaning that compels rereading. I am anxious for Emerson’s next book, and yet also not anxious, for the poems here provide enough to engage me until then.”—Lynn Domina

“With superb artistry and a cool, but never cold, eye, Emerson sublimates her grief into elegant elegy, unsentimental and unforgettable—as when, driving past a house fire’s ‘bright-rising / enravishment,’ she does ‘not stop to watch someone else’s / tragedy burn past this brief, nearly / beautiful suspension that changes nothing.’”—Andrew Hudgins

“I really do not know of another writer of her generation who can weave such diverse materials together to make such a cohesive and urgent whole. With Secure the Shadow, Emerson once again proves that she is among our essential poets.”—David Wojahn

“From the ghostly likenesses of children in postmortem photographs, the architectural remains of small-town businesses gone under—remnants of the interstate’s swift abandon—to the hidden vein of uranium beneath a plot of local farmland, these poems reckon with losses both personal and communal. This is a hauntingly beautiful collection from a poet attentive to measure and the ways of things in both the natural and man-made worlds to reveal to us ‘musings of a lucid soul / or the disclosures of God.’”—Natasha Trethewey

“Secure the Shadow may seem to be about death, the brother’s death, the father’s death, everyone’s death. Yet the poems themselves, graceful, sturdy, fiercely controlled, profoundly imaged, are the poet’s brilliant argument for life. With realism and dignity, she balances pain and grief word by word to arrive at startling wisdom and extraordinary freedom. A beautiful, beautiful book that sounds the depths of love.”—Kelly Cherry

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