Planetary Noise: Selected Poetry

Drawing on four decades of writing by Canadian poet and translator Moure (Kapusta), this rare volume reveals and celebrates the trajectory of her mind. Its success derives from both editor Maguire’s astute organization and the depth and generosity of Moure’s work. From her early lean lyrics though recent genre-defying poems located at the intersections of archive, performance, and translation, Moure’s abiding inquiries into the limits of subjectivity and language continually push into new formal, musical, and intellectual territory. “The writer as witness, speaking the stories, is a lie, a liberal bourgeois lie,” she writes in an account of a boy hit by a train. Moure’s work begins at the limits of language; her poems become multilingual, and then multiauthored. These poems unfold along borders: geopolitical; linguistic; between noise and meaning; between identities real and imagined; and among quoted, translated, and original material. As Moure adopts increasingly intricate premises to trouble the edges of authorship and textuality, her works become difficult to excerpt; by the end, a reader new to Moure may have the feeling of only just scratching the surface. This volume highlights the vast contributions of an important writer whose work should be more widely known in the U.S. (Mar.)