Lynn Emanuel has published two previous books of poetry, The Dig (1992, University of Illinois Press) and Hotel Fiesta (1984, University of Georgia Press). Both books are now available in a two-volume book, The Dig and Hotel Fiesta, published by the University of Illinois Press, 1995. Hotel Fiesta won the Great Lakes Colleges Association's New Writers Award. The Dig received the National Poetry Series Award.

Reviews

"Emanuel's great feat in The Dig ... is her display of poems as living relics of an archaeological expedition into memory and human folly. . . . Many of these poems, at once charmed and frightening, have an unexpected effect, like the urgent and luckysight of a child's hand waving through the rubble of an earthquake. . . . Emanuel has managed to lock a great deal of humanity into this humorous, inspiring, and honest record of a place too quickly forgotten." -- Frances McCue, New York Times Book Review

"Emanuel's poems burst with image, metaphor, simile! This figurative language, however, is not excessive, not contrived. Her energy simply overflows. Every line is rich, yet spare. Every word is cogent." -- Harriet Zinnes, The Hollins Critic

The citizens of Rapallo, the Italian seaport town where [Ezra] Pound spent his last years, refer to marble as la pietra di luce, 'the stone of light.' The old expatriate could hardly have wished for more cogent illumination of his theory regarding the sculpturesque qualities of poetry than the lucid planes and surfaces that Emanuel manages to strike from language." -- Floyd Collins, The Gettysburg Review

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from The New York Times Book Review:

In Short/University Presses

THE DIG
By Lynn Emanuel.
University of Illinois, paper, $10.95.

Lynn Emanuel's great feat in "The Dig," a 1992 National Poetry Series winner, is her displkay of poems as living relics of an archeological expedition into memory and human folly. The poems record the 1950's of Ely, Nev., a town that stands adjacent to a testing site where "the atomic bomb came biting like a swarm / of bees." They recount the townspeoples' lives, "mortgaged to a ghost" in a sorrowful landscape of copper mines and decaying railroads. In this dig into what Robert Lowell called the "tranquilized 50's," Ms. Emanuel sensibly divides her work between two voices. One is an italicized speaker, perhaps the archeologist, who records the aerial, critical view of "the dig." The second, more prolific speaker is the artist, who offers clear, unpredictable and intimate descriptions: "The bomb was no mind and all body; it sent a fire / of static down the spine." In tandem, these voices balance distortion with clarity and tragedy with wry, human glee: "In the atom's fizz and pop we heard possibility / uncorked. ... The world was beginning all over again, fresh and hot;/ we could have anything we wanted." Many of these poems, at once charmed and frightening, have an unexpected effect, like the urgent and lucky sight of a child's hand waving through the rubble of an earthquake. Ms. Emanuel's grimacing curator says of herself, shrewdly and tenderly: "But honey, you can't fit a girl like that / into the straightjacket of a book of poems." She's right, of course. Poems remain, ultimately, inadequate. Still, Ms. Emanuel has managed to lock a great deal of humanity into this humorous, inspiring and honest record of a place too quickly forgotten.FRANCES MCCUE

Copyright © 1992 The New York Times