Chicory Blue Press: Memior

Memoir

Poems by Honor Moore
0-9619111-1-5
$11.95

This first collection of poems by Honor Moore brings together such much-acclaimed poems as “First Time 1950,” “My Mother’s Moustache” and “Spuyten Duyvil.” Several of Memoir's twenty-five poems explore in richly personal terms such public issues as the nuclear threat, AIDS, the struggle for accommodation between the sexes, sexual abuse. All of the poems, in a style described by Marilyn Hacker as “consummately textured, most elegant when most desperate,” explore the turbulent course of love, including erotic, sensuous love as well as the many-layered attachments to family. June Jordan praises Honor Moore for being a poet “who can boast, ‘I am not afraid to begin to love or to keep loving’.”

Honor Moore is the author of The White Blackbird, the biography of her grandmother, Margarett Sargent. Her verse play, Mourning Pictures, is anthologized in The New Women’s Theatre, which she edited.

As if excavating her life, Honor Moore has uncovered with care the artifacts of the heart, and with deep intelligence explored the fissures in common speech and the shiftings of consciousness beneath them. At memory’s insistence she has written this book, which opens with one of the most important poetic meditations on nuclear war to have been published during the past decade and concludes with an intimate, almost epistolary poem about a friend who died of AIDS. We are thus in the presence of a poet who can be praised not only for the eloquence and musicality of her voice, but also for the courage of her moral engagement. It is not only beautiful work, it is brave. Carolyn Forché