From the Houston Chronicle oct 23 2005

New in Poetry
Startling imagery

By Robert Phillips
RED SHOES. - By Hohor Moore. Norton. 112 pp. $23S5.: .
There are two Honor Moores writing in her new and third poetry collection. The first appears in the book’s initial sections. She is a poet’who posits startling, original, near-surreal imagery. I wish I had, space to list all the strangely satisfying combinations of words I have checked in this book. Here are a few:

A sheep sails down my ann —
Summer came/blistering like an ambulance…
the moan leaving her scuff marks ...
the telephone, her mouth open
sheets bright as mirrors

Only occasionally do her images puzzle, as in “the glass, door was spinning panes/like an open book.” Does an open book have panes to spin? Once in a while a title puzzles, such as Doorway, which is not about a doorway, unless she is talking about an emotional state. The image overreaches. She also uses the noun “rope” a lot.

But generally these are highly ‘satisfying poems, with pleasures like “At his goldcry, the rooster’s crown/flares” and “even the black we wore was bright/moving -across blonde grass.” Throughout the volume she has effects besides poetic images She is master of enjambment: “On this wide table in the dark/city outside” two lines that give us both a table in a dark room and the dark/city outside accomplished with a mere line break. She also creates musical effects, in this instance use of participial phrases: “coloratura/dipthongs leaping, dipping, veering all the way to aspirin...”

In her poem on Wallace Stevens, Moore writes, “We/were discussing the limits of image, how impossible for word/to personate entirely thing,” and one can see an influence of Stevens in her imagery. I suspect, like Stevens, she believes poetry is the ultimate fusion of objective reality and imagination.

After all the fireworks in the book’s first two sections, the second Honor Moore takes over in the third, a quieter affair. It traces her friendship with and the death of the photographer and sometime painter Inge Morath. It is as if the subject matter of illness and death toned down the poet’s sensibility, the language made more plain:

Before he turned to leave
she gazed at the height of him

I was rubbing her foot
its heat back’

In this elegiac sequence her lines often are longer, and she waxes philosophical: “Why should the living proclaim hard truth to the dying?”. It is moving musing on human morality and mortality.

6/1/2005 BOOKLIST
Moore, Honor. Red Shoes. June 2005. 112p. Norton,

Moore’s third collection begins with a tango and never loses the keyed-up, elegant, ritualized eroticism of the push and pull of that dangerous courtship dance. The abrupt turns, the dagger stares, the barely sustained restraint, all this is found in Moore’s sexy, telegraphic, edgy, and rapt poetry. Gloves, suits, silks, shoes—all are talismans of desire, tantalizing and thwarting. Reveries, memories, and dreams pitch from the vividly concrete to the uninhibitedly surreal as the poet dreams of her deceased parents, remembers a family home, gazes out windows at sunsets and rain, and considers the touch of fugitive lovers. Recurrent images appear like birds landing on ledges or suddenly remembered songs, as the poet’s musings shift from the erotic to the spiritual in “Gnostic,” the aesthetic in an homage to Wallace Stevens, and the elegiac in a graceful cycle of poems portraying photographer and friend Inge Morath. Exquisitely visual, cuttingly witty, Moore’s poems are at once cool and searing. —Donna Seaman