Underground: New and Selected Poems

"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%E2%80%94always clear, always serious%E2%80%94grows 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." (Sept.)