From The Village Voice, March 1989

MEMOIR
By Honor Moore
Chicory Blue Press, 1988Honor-Moore’s poems speak of a strong faith in hard work and in the land of working alone. Her poems mark out both the experiences she describes and, as in “Letter in Late July,” the experience of making a book of poems (even the experience of being photographed for the book’s jacket):

a key reconciles

green words on a black screen. But
nothing merges
painlessly enough with memory. I could
cook a lambchop or murder
mosquitoes.

Though she has been widely published and anthologized (I can’t get enough of “My Mother’s Mustache”), Memoir is Moore’s long-awaited first collection. Waiting itself becomes a force in the book, transforming incidents into self-knowledge, and that knowledge into tradition. Take “Dream,” written, the inscription tells us, after a lecture delivered on Emily Dickinson by Adrienne Rich (to whom Moore owes a great deal).

I move closer, see your face
focus, dissolve to your

mother’s face: her face, your face,
hers, yours, hers, until you merge,

say to me, I will not go away.

Most of the poems in Memoir are in traditional forms—sapphics, sestinas, and a hendecasyllabic arrangement that looks like a recurring hourglass. And since forms, like contracts, best frame certain styles of discourse—hendecasyllabics hold the long narratives, sapphics lend a unifying music to shorter ones—the service Moore performs by concentrating so much on the stubborn sestina is that she’s coaxed pleasure from this recalcitrant form. In only one have content and architecture slipped out of their best fit. In “Cleis,” an attractive woman cruising a pair of lovers from a jeep becomes, in the poet’s imagination, Sappho’s daughter Cleis. Had this poem been constructed in the sapphic “mother lyric” instead of the sestina, it might have been even more effective.

In her other six sestinas, ranging from a birthday letter to a narration of a young girl’s sexual molestation, the insistence of the terminal endings mirrors Moore’s layering consciousness. She makes use of, believe it or not, the form’s playfulness in a way altogether ignored by many other contemporary writers. One can be more than halfway through “A Green Place,” for example, before realizing that necessity as well as invention is dictating the repetition of words.

“What’s beyond making love?” A true
question.
“Time,” I quip, knowing my imagining
seeks an answer to soothe fear from
your face. If
we could freeze the instant in sex when
light
shudders and we let time go, the clear
light of morning which turns lush green

silvery. Beyond making love? Green
if it’s a place. Here any question
leads to an answer if put clearly...

Moore has a special place in the community of poets and writers not only for her craftsmanship, but also for the scope of her attentions—both public and private domains. Her vision of family and friends renders them microcosmic embodiments of a larger world. On public issues, as in the two poems that frame the book like a pair of broad shoulders—a long poem, “Spuyten Duyvil,” about nuclear holocaust, and an elegy to a friend dead of AIDS—Moore is intensely personal.

“Sober you can
do anything, “you told Joan. Jimmy
said
your last days the virus at your brain
had you
in summer at the door on Fire Island
offering refreshments as guests arrived,
beautiful men, one after another.

Moore has also been willing to write of intimate relationships with both men and women, making her one of a very few poets whose work flows transsexually, so to speak. She advocates love in the context of public courage, as in “Spuyten Duyvil”:

I am not afraid to begin to love or
to keep loving. Even in this fire,
it is not fear I feel but heartbreak.

—Robyn Selman