Wayfarers

This collection of slight lyrics from Moore (Numa) unfolds as a band of explorers traverse the figurative shadow of an unnamed, protean, and possibly calamitous past event. The poems are delicately detailed, but they’re largely descriptive; when there is action, the ways in which that action occurs or affects the described objects often remains vague: “The old woman remained, sleeping on fallen brick, eating, if she ate, from abandoned stores in shells of houses./ But I had my daughters, so I left her.” Photographs of assembled shells, branches, and stones on dark background feature throughout the collection, largely, like the poems, static portraits of things left behind. In “Remnants,” the “torn tip of a butterfly/ wing” begins a list that ends with dictionary repurposed to prop up “a window with// a broken sash”; in “Liminal,” the “mucky/ patch at the back steps” provides the location for contemplation of a “Boundless—something—.” The stasis Moore creates gives readers time to breathe and ponder the landscape, but that same quality hinders the poems’ ability to build tension or accrete heft. (Jan.)