Claudia Emerson's "Impossible Bottle" - Slipping into Time Itself

Impossible Bottle: Poems by Claudia Emerson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

What do you do when you discover you have a terminal cancer, much like family and friends who grew up where you did? If you are Claudia Emerson, between chemo treatments and doctor visits and trying to live your life for as long and as well as possible, you also write a beautiful (and as it turned out final) collection of poetry.

Emerson's "Impossible Bottle" is that glass container within which a sailboat was placed as she watched when a child. It is also the container of her life, her body, her mind, her soul. And it is the bottle that is this book and her other poems wherein she tries to place a miniature that is true to all she was and all she lived.

Claudia Emerson had so much more to contribute and so many more poems to write before she dies. Her death came much too soon. She left behind these words and images, for which we are grateful. And their echoes haunt us now that Claudia Emerson has slipped away into time itself:

"Only/they can tell you, when you/return to them, what you can live without, what/regenerates, and on hearing it,/you feel a lightening, the way a snake must/on slipping through its discarded/mouth into another year, or, knowing nothing/of a year, into time itself."



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