Moore: Complete Prose

There are few poets whose complete prose one would want to own. Yet in this fat volume of over 400 pieces, written between 1907 and 1972 roughly half when Moore was a writer for and later the editor of the prestigious magazine Dialthere's not one piece that doesn't arrest by virtue of its perspicacity, intensity and extraordinary compactness of expression. There are long reviews of such major contemporary poets as Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Williams, Cummings and Auden, plus one on Henry James; essays on a wide variety of topics including philosophy, biography, painting, linguistics and anything that caught Moore's interest, from fashion to the circus; short reviews and ""notices'' of books; and a bit of fiction. The hallmarks of Moore's critical style are a brilliant use of quotation, an unfailing responsiveness to the subtleties of poetic sound and sense, and an almost constant ability to surprise. This is the prose work of a poet who was, as she put it, ``incurably interested in writing'' and addicted to its element of ``personal adventure.'' (November 24)