Underground
New and Selected Poems
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
"Jim Moore writes of history, of love, of pain, of the intimate revelations of a consciousness alive to itself." —C. K. Williams
"It's coming so fast,"
says an old woman across from me,
speaking to no one in particular:
she nods her head in agreement with herself
and strictly speaking
who can argue with her? —from "Underground"
Jim Moore's first career retrospective shows a poet whittling down experience to its essential confrontation with one's own limitations, whether it be time running short, or understanding running thin, or capacity to think or feel or love enough running low. Underground gathers the best poems from Moore's seven previous books and includes twenty new poems. This is the definitive volume by a poet of great depth and generosity.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"Love takes you/ where you need to go,/ no exceptions." Sweetly inviting and strongly felt, Moore's first retrospective (featuring 19 new poems) meditates upon conjugal love, Italian travel, everyday happiness, and filial grief. As a poet with origins in the 1970s Midwest, Moore's spare free verse is attuned to archetype, but unlike his peers, he veers more towards optimism. He is a democratic writer in search of universals, offering simple but grounding counsel: "I love what I can." Jailed for resisting the military draft in 1970, Moore's poems take up a common theme in addressing such topics as the Vietnam-era draft, the Iron Curtain, and the Iraq War. He concludes that "things happen/ beyond our power to understand them," though his attitude always clear, always serious grows more confident nearer to home and in the precincts of his memory: "Surrounded by the vastness/ of a life yet to be lived." Readers attuned to the avant-garde will no doubt find much of this gathering sentimental, but this selection shows how Moore's writing has changed over time. Nevertheless, these five decades of poems are of a piece, showing that the world is beautiful, yet it "fails its beauty./ What choice, but to love the failings themselves."
