REVIEWS
Reviews for ENTER
Let Jim Moore show you a way to the happiness the world can offer . . . he calls out more wonder and tenderness than I could have imagined. He is Orphic. He harmonizes our common pain with the small and complicated graces of living. I am so glad to enter into these poems, into this book!
—G. E. Patterson
Enter reminds us that for each departing there was also an entering. And though death is constantly present in this book, Moore pushes back against it with a shaggy refuge gathered from the minute pleasures that are often all we have. None of that feels like overworked reverence, but rather a poet finding, sometimes painstakingly, his way to believe it.
—CJ Evans
A wonderfully companionable warmth and conversational ease run through the poems in Enter. . . . I can’t think of a poet today who kindles more resonance in thought and depth of feeling out of what (at first) seems simply fashioned. . . . It all feels quite extraordinary in Jim Moore’s hands.
—Erin Belieu
Reviews for PROGNOSIS
The New York Times
“Moore is preoccupied with old age, loneliness, mortality, and also with the American body politic’s own failure. These are poems of arresting lyric reportage; whimsical, tragic, a touch fantastical …” [ read more ]
Minneapolis StarTribune
“Minnesota poet Jim Moore confronts the modern world with a wise and compassionate eye” [ read more ]
Reviews for UNDERGROUND: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS
The New York Times
“Jim Moore’s poems are an artful amalgam of humor and fierce attention, suffused by a passion for ancient Asian poetry. Like his sage poet-teachers he grasps the quiet power of white space, knowing that what is unsaid is often just as crucial as what is.”
Minneapolis StarTribune
“Gathering from Jim Moore’s seven previous collections and including new work, “Underground: New and Selected Poems” demonstrates Moore’s consistent dedication to the revelatory power of the image.”
Ploughshares
“I have loved Jim Moore’s brief ‘invisible strings’ since I first stumbled into a few in a magazine. They are chips of reality, obsidian flakes of the heart and mind.” –Jane Hirshfield
Reviews for INVISIBLE STRINGS
“Jim Moore’s poems are an artful amalgam of humor and fierce attention, suffused by a passion for ancient Asian poetry. Like his sage poet-teachers he grasps the quiet power of white space, knowing that what is unsaid is often just as crucial as what is. Mr. Moore’s strengths are all at work in “Epitaph,” here in full: “He stole forsythia./He lived for love./He never got caught.”
As Mr. Moore’s years have lengthened, so too have his poetics deepened: “The more I study it now,/the art of my superiors, the more/I see how it is mostly darkness.” Still, Mr. Moore never succumbs to chic nihilism. He relishes the music in “the dog’s long contented sighs.” And he pays attention to more than the eternal. Of Italy he writes, “How can you not love a country where the meter maids wear high heels?” [ read more ]
The Believer (Editor’s Shortlist)
“In his seventh collection, Jim Moore writes with a Zen-like clarity poems about the natural world, relationships, memory, and the passage of time. These are sparse, clear-eyed poems from a man writing from the autumn years of his life—one foot firmly planted on earth, the other extended outward, toes cautiously tickling the unknown. In a late poem: “the black dog / on the wet sand chases the red ball / until the end of time.”
The Rumpus
[ excerpt ] Jim Moore faces this dilemma of meaning and attempted meaning throughout Invisible Strings, his newest book of poems, and so, as it can be with double-sided dilemmas, some of the poems are terrific, simple, lovely diagrams of human phenomenologies: loneliness, old age and in the more ambitious poems: observations of what the world does to the world. [ read more ]
Ploughshares (Editor’s Choice by Jane Hirshfield)
“I have loved Jim Moore’s brief ‘invisible strings’ since I first stumbled into a few in a magazine. They are chips of reality, obsidian flakes of the heart and mind. In form they remind me strongly of Mary Barnard’s translations of Sappho (the way a set-apart first line functions as both title and opening). Their fragmentary quality, and their deep affirmation of reality as it is, does as well. And, as with Sappho, the worldview here is complex, nuanced, and deep. These poems are also, I should add, thoroughly of our own time, with their references to Abu Ghraib, freeways, and cell phones, and thoroughly the work of an American man of a certain age, looking at his own life and at the lives of others with fully open eyes, mind, and heart.”
Portland Book Review
[ excerpt ] His writing is sometimes brief and to the point, but this less-is-more technique allows the reader to search for meaning between the lines. [ read more ]
OONA | on contemporary poetry and poetics
[ excerpt ] Most comforting of all, is Moore’s ability to portray the intense anxiety that comes with a life well loved. “I want to believe it,” Moore writes in The Four Stages of Love, “I don’t have to be afraid/for my own death, not even,/Love, for yours”. Moore reminds us, in Above All, Don’t Forget, “to worry about what you do deserve,/what you don’t”. A short poem entitled Waiting to Take Off simply mentions the superstitious act of “try[ing] not to listen to the directions/to the emergency exits”.
Cerise Press
[ excerpt ] Moore writes of what brings us closer, and of those accidental encounters that trigger the emotions. Age and gravity scrape away the superficial, leaving the bare essences of what makes us human. [ read more ]
Exercise Bowler
[ excerpt ] If poetry is meant to be spoken, it is the poetry of Jim Moore.
Loch Raven
[ excerpt ] Their brevity [Moore’s poems] and impressionism make the larger, abstract ideas of ruin, death, loss, love, and companionship which they’re set against seem all the more terrible and gratifying.