The title of this review post–so facile as to be vaguely macabre–is nonetheless accurate in the sense that Claudia Emerson’s project in writing Impossible Bottle is framed by a performative paradox: on the one hand, these poems document her courageous-but-losing battle with terminal cancer and, on the other, as they were published posthumously, represent a kind of aesthetic triumph in death. I propose here to conduct a kind of lyrical forensic inquiry into the death Emerson imagines for herself and to celebrate the inimitable invention and grace with which she composes her own living eulogy. Suspended as they are between a determinate end in death itself and the limitless renewal in art, these poems are at once elegies for the failing light in a doomed body and encomiums for the luminous voice of poetic imagination.
To be clear, there is tragedy enough here to preoccupy us for the rest of our own lives. I sense, however, a deeper, more sustained gesture toward the redemptive, transformative power of language. And it is in this spirit of reverence for Emerson’s life and splendid art that I submit this appreciation of her work as revelation, as “the body of light that swings from the rafters”
I begin with some basic claims about the structure of the book. Each of the four sections, Anatomies, Infusion Suite, Participant Observations, and Impossible Bottle, advances a different lyrical mode with which to fix in place and illuminate her experience of cancer. I believe this partitioning of the book permits Emerson to establish a narrative arc for the project and perhaps also an expressive motif for leaving behind what she has finished, a way of closing doors. And as cancer radically implicates the body in its own formulations, each section is a parallel attempt to locate the body within a language congruent to the crisis. I will examine passages from two of the four sections: Anatomies, which looks closely at the body and Impossible Bottle, which synthesizes her vision of knowledge and meaning in the context of death. Singular as they are in their approach to the problem of death, they are both personal encounters with the real implication of dying and an exploration of the poet’s responsibility at the end of life, at the end of words.
Emerson is, of course, teaching herself and us the language of cancer, of disease, of entropy, of collapse. Consider this astonishing moment from the Anatomies section, “MRI,” which I quote here at length to show Emerson’s extraordinary move from the geometric containment of a medical test to the transcendent freedom of imaginative experience:
The metaphor for it metastasizes, too:
I am in the belly
of the beast, the belly of the whale, in some sterile
wilderness, desert
island, sand-blind. I am the thread in the deep
eye of a needle, in some
percussive otherworld that rises up
every time I exhale
and hold still my empty lungs. And then I come to
and settle on a tunnel
a real one, the one they call Paw Paw
for the nearby trees
and a day in early June three years ago,
and I can stay there.
In just seven exquisitely crafted couplets, Emerson stages a daring escape from the living entombment of medical technology and, more importantly, from the reductive forces of the medical arts. As each new test thrusts her toward a world of private apocalypse, each poetic enjambment pushes her farther toward a world of inner negotiations with the nature of her project. If she finds herself “in the belly of the beast,” then she has also found a rhetoric for addressing the beast. Indeed, one of this book’s remarkable achievements is its wildly inventive range of reference and kaleidoscopically shifting modes of address. From the Impossible Bottle section, the collection’s penultimate poem, “The Earthquake,” brilliantly recasts the twin problem of disease and doom as an investigation into the mystery of calamity:
She thinks first not of the earth but of herself,
something happening
to her body alone, some sort of spell
a seizure. But the frames
on the walls seize, too, the walls themselves
at a nervous pitch,
the floor’s sudden cradling. The door breaks its lock
and swings open. She knows
it for what it is only when its stops, with shocked
clarity, the way
nothing alive ever has.
This is Emerson’s characteristic move, an unblinking gaze at the object of her doom: an unstoppable trembling of nature in its seizure of transformative motions. But for Emerson, unstoppable never means inexplicable. And it is her capacity to interrogate every moment, particularly those moments between revelations and epiphanies, that retrieves her (and us!) and this book from despair.
Impossible Bottle is indeed a book filled with impossible objects and untraceable arcs of poetic argumentation. But Emerson’s willingness to inscribe every perception with some gesture toward a radical eruption of possibility is the evidence both of her courage and her honesty as a witness to her own ultimacy. Language itself becomes thus the only reliable treatment for cancer. And if it cannot finally sustain life, we are nonetheless reminded how the world is marked, changed, and healed by a searching heart “and the familiar art of sorrow”
