What We’re Reading: Underground

Underground: New and Selected Poems by Jim Moore (Graywolf Press, September 2, 2014)

Underground is a hefty book of poetry, both in size (275 pages) and imprint. These are poems mostly of daily life observations, poems that wind their way into your own daily life, causing you to see the woman at the bus stop you take every day, or the barista at your favorite coffee shop in a new, refreshed light. Underground is Moore’s first  retrospective collection of both selected and new poems, featuring poems from his previous seven books of poetry, as well as twenty new poems. Retrospective collections like this spanning a writer’s career are always daunting to me for reviews, as there is just so much to talk about. While I do my best to work through these poems, you’ll enjoy it more if you just buy the book once it publishes September 2.

I love Moore’s poetry because it’s so easy to enter his world with his simple yet profound language. He has a clear and confident voice that tremors with emotion when writing of politics or loss, while in another poem, casting an aura of delight around a daily moment. While reading through this glance at his life’s work thus far, I feel that he increasingly zeroes in on his subjects, his focus, his voice by his mid-career, and then his later and most recent work opens up again. This isn’t to say that they don’t have focus or voice, but rather, they have a light airiness about them, and often turn the eye back towards the reader. It’s interesting to see this trajectory and shift in atmosphere in Moore’s work throughout the years.

First section of poems from the 1975 book The New Body. This is work of a poet grounded in daily life observations, and writing in a direct, personal tone. A couple poems are for other writers, namely, Tom McGrath and Meridel LeSueur. His fresh use of language in a surprising fashion brings this section alive, which bubbles through in this first section of the poem “Music” for Meridel LeSueur:

I.

The cold egg of the snow cracks open,
broadens into chunks of fog.
10 A.M. and the street corner is invisible.
I turn on the electric heater, listen to Casals,
watch the branches like thin asparagus stalks
shrouded and growing under water.
Something lives here bigger than my skin,
larger even than the old man Pablo bent over his bow,
the old man Pablo brushing his quick strokes on paper,
the old man Pablo writing his last poem from a hospital bed.

Moore also quickly shows us that he’s just as adept with long poems as he is with short poems, such as the poem “How to Close the Great Distance Between People”, quoted here in its entirety:

Do it over coffee,
like fish that appear to be talking,
but are really eating to stay alive.

In the next section, from 1988’s The Freedom of History, we see the poet with his brow furrowed a bit more. He takes on politics (the Iron Curtain in Prague in 1980), rape, terrorism, and world travel. In selections from The Long Experience of Love (1995), includes familial poems about the speaker’s mother, father, an imagined son, daughter, friends, and more intimate portraits of people. The sections move on, shifting slightly in tone or subject, bringing the reader along the trajectory of Moore’s writing. Later selections show Moore as more pondering, often asking questions, wondering aloud without necessarily filling in the answers. This pointed awareness brings us into his world, and in turn, we bring his world into our own life routines, his questions and pondering thoughts following us throughout our day.

The final section of new poems, title “Twenty Questions”, starts with those questions again, and in fact, the first and title poem turns us back to that awareness of the surrounding world:

Did I forget to look at the sky this morning
when I first woke up? Did I miss the willow tree?
The white gravel road that goes up from the cemetery,
but to where? And the abandoned house on the hill, did it get
even a moment? Did I notice the small clouds so slowly
moving away?

This section includes a sparser, less-definite Moore. If wisdom comes with age, then wisdom for Moore is all about asking yourself questions, and probing deeper, always deeper. The lines of his poem stretch out, taking up space, and not worrying about the increasing white space between the lines. The form of these poems is confident and clear, just like Moore’s tone.

Mark your calendars for September 11, 7:00 pm for Jim Moore’s publication launch celebration for Underground at the Loft Literary Center. I’ve marked mine!

What other career retrospectives have you read that have stuck with you? Is there a writer that you’ve noticed a large shift in their work over time?