Harry V. Moore
Writer, Retired English Professor
Harry Moore grew up on a small farm in East Central Alabama. With degrees in English from Auburn University, Rice University, and Middle Tennessee State University, he taught freshman comp and sophomore literature in community college for four decades.
His poems have appeared in the Elk River Review, The Distillery, Alabama Literary Review, Teaching English in the Two-Year College, POEM, South Carolina Review, Avocet, Ship of Fools, Anglican Theological Review, Penwood Review, Main Street Rag, Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, and other journals.Since retiring from teaching in 2009, he has published six books of poetry:
What He Would Call Them, Finishing Line Press, 2013 (chapbook)
Time’s Fool: Love Poems, Mule on a Ferris Wheel Press, 2014 (chapbook)
Retreat: A Way Forward, Finishing Line Press, 2017 (chapbook)
Bearing the Farm Away, Kelsay Books, 2018 (full collection)
Beyond Paradise: The Unweeded Garden, Main Street Rag Publications, 2020 (chapbook)
Broken and Blended: Love's Alchemy, Kelsay Books, 2021 (full collection)
In 2014 he received the Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award for poetry from Poets & Writers.Currently serving as an assistant editor of POEM magazine, he lives with his wife, Cassandra, in Decatur, Alabama.
***Broken & Blended: Love's Alchemy
***
Kelsay Books, May 2021.
Beyond Paradise: The Unweeded Garden
Main Street Rag, March 2020.
Bearing the Farm Away
Kelsay Books, April 2018.
Retreat: A Way Forward
Finishing Line Press, Sept. 2017.
Table of Contents
Part I: A Time to Speak
Controlling the Narrative
Part II: A Time to Mourn
Breaking Up
Some Say Love
On the Run (I)
On the Run (II)
Moving On
Forgetting
Long Distance
Time's Fool
Two Planets
The Stapler
Part III: A Time to Embrace
Valediction
Decisions and Revisions
Turn, Turn, Turn
Eros
Anniversary
License My Roving Hands
Forbidding Mourning
Part IV: A Time to Heal
A Summer's Day
Flashback
Youngest
The Sentence
Ushering at Easer
Not-Father
Home Again
A Place of His Own
The Eagle
Part V: A Time to Build Up
The Royal Family
Actually
Breakfast at the Beach
The Call
Hands
Consider Lillie
Jonah
Sophie
Part VI: A Time to Dance
GP's Wife Does National Boards
As You Like It
Darwin Chuckles of GP Studies Natural Selection
About Time
Probably Not or The Tangled Art of Connubial Meta-Messages
Absence
An Evening
This Only
Aiding and Abetting
Part V: A Time for Peace
Packing Up
All Things New
A Way Forward
Reviews
It is easy to praise these poems for their skillful construction, their precise imagery, the way form finds its right way to shape the telling of these stories—but what I respond most directly to is the rich humanity of Moore's vision. Marriages, children, grandchildren, and the process of living a life and aging into some kind of wisdom (or at the very least self-knowledge) make up the subject matter of Broken and Blended, and at the heart of Moore's explorations is what it means to be a man in relationship with others. The imperfect, important work of love shines through, and gives all of us—however broken or blended or mended—hope.
(Jennifer Horne, Alabama Poet Laureate, author of Bottle Tree, Little Wanderer, and Borrowed Light)
In Broken and Blended, Harry Moore provides a story arc moving from deep and grinding loss toward healing and regeneration, all with the awareness that life is forever in flux. The poems move from knowledge gained in Eden through a painful divorce which leaves the poet “weeping into the light falling heavily/once or twice on the lumpy ground” he cannot see. Subsequent sections address times to “embrace,” “heal,” “build up,” “dance,” and finally “a time for peace.” We meet the poet’s children, his stepchildren, his wife, all portrayed through an honest lens that accommodates the flaws and imperfections of our existence. In the end, the poet assures that, although life is “pending, provisional, tentative,” its alchemy works magic—pain, grief, loss coalesce into a fully experienced life and love, remembered on the page.
(Nancy Owen Nelson, author of My Heart Wears No Colors and Portals: A Memoir in Verse)
Broken and Blended offers a fresh, contemporary version of an old, familiar story, with its seasons of loss and gain, joy and sorrow, errancy and renewal. In richly allusive, clear and conversational language, Harry Moore tells this story of love’s transformations with humor, affection and wry self-awareness, from the point of view of a husband, father, step-father and grandfather who feels deeply and sometimes “ ‘think[s] too much.’ ” Beautifully and subtly well- crafted, the poems’ rhythmic cadences, wordplay, apt metaphors and at times surprising twists draw the reader into this engaging narrator’s world and state of mind. Do we control the narrative, or does the story—our biology, gender, raising, circumstance—control us? Broken and Blended implicitly asks these questions, even as it affirms that “We must be able to say what / happened,” that “This is how we know.”
(Susan Luther, author of Breathing in the Dark, Greatest Hits, and other chapbooks)
Beyond Paradise: The Unweeded Garden
Main Street Rag, March 2020.
Table of Contents
"Roots"
"Focus"
"Hospitality"
"Self-Interest"
"Decisions and Revisions"
"Time (I)"
"Only Natural"
"Who Cares"
"The Common Good"
Greed and Grace"
"Our Daily Bread"
"Conversation"
"Hell to Pay"
"Grounded"
"Advent"
"Metaphor"
"Belief"
"Have a Bloody Blessed Day"
"Time (II)"
"Time (III)"
"Creation"
"Go Figure"
"Texting"
"The Compulsive Semiologist"
"Cognitive Therapy or Narcissus Goes to Counseling"
"Paradise Un-defined"
"Term Limits"
"That's Not All"
"In Our Stars"
Reviews
Beyond Paradise: The Unweeded Garden
Main Street Rag, March 2020.
These are poems spun out of the essence of wording, projecting sound toward some object or some experience with the notion that sound can recreate the original in some fashion. They make shape from the shapelessness of living. Are we imposing an order on chaos or have we discovered a hidden order that is revealed only by our participation? Moore’s unweeded paradise may lead us toward an answer. (Jake Berry)
“Words are themselves sacred,” and Harry Moore celebrates that sanctity. In this exploration of etymology, each poem is an unearthing of the forgotten, an inquiry into the ways language both shapes and explains our world. While words may grow “wild as weeds,” here, they are carefully cultivated. It’s delightful, each time, to “watch a word emerge / from the page’s white void.” These poems are, indeed, a paradise of intellect, information, and pure pleasure.” (Jessica Temple)
Making One's Mark
Beyond Paradise: The Unweeded Garden
Main Street Rag, March 2020.
< OE mearc, orig., boundary, hence
boundary sign, hence sign.Digging for ancestors, I find their
mark X beside the name on deeds
and pension applications, proving
what I know already: farmers
scratching rocky soil for cotton,
corn, peas, the endless round
of planting and plowing—every field
a palimpsest, with rain, wind, kudzu,
scorching sun covering furrows
where they walked, leaving little
trace.If there is no border,
no boundary, we must make one,
put down roots, set the pole
on spinning Earth, else no north, no
margin of our own, words growing
wild as weeds, phrases floating
without sentence.Evening descends
with wrens’ song and sparrow chatter
in the walled garden. Swirling the
amber liquid against the glass’s
rounded edge, I see an orbit I ride,
vortex, maelstrom, quiet eye
of the turning world, the bourbon’s
cold bite.
Country Matters
Beyond Paradise: The Unweeded Garden
Main Street Rag, March 2020.
Country is contra, opposite, outside
the city, neither urban, suburban,
nor urbane, past the walls of civitas,
keeping a thin and distant civility.Country roars off-road in tall trucks
beyond the bustling polis. Wary of
police, careless of policy, it is not
metro-, cosmo-, or otherwise politan.Country is brash, defiant, proud. It grows
and cooks its own food—collards, peas,
corn, squash, tomatoes, slabs of bacon.
Suspicious of everything political, it
votes for any charlatan, demagogue,
or slicker who talks its rustic tongue.Country strains past hills, mountains,
plains, rivers, beaches—past birthplace,
native region, tribe, sect, race, clan—
toward one nation it never reaches. It
struts and crows under God, but always
its god, not another’s.Country is contra, opposite, outside
the limits, against the city’s money,
its art, science, ivy ideas, its judges,
committees, traffic, sidewalk crowds,
motley masses, its leaders who say how
citizens should drive, eat, marry, pray,
and fire their guns.
Sacrament
Beyond Paradise: The Unweeded Garden
Main Street Rag, March 2020.
West of St. John’s Church, weeds burst
from a concrete street divider: goosefoot,
pepperweed, sow’s ear, wild lettuce, dogfennel, horseweed, crabgrass—scraggly
stems and stalks, gripping dirt-filled cracks,
pushing toward the light. Inside the church,we kneel on velvet cushions, gazing east
toward the altar and the rising sun. We take
into ourselves the dying God. A scriptedsermon says he weeps with us, opens a way
through dark despair, forgives our writhing
guilt, the hurt we do others, rises in our lonelyand unfeeling hearts, giving us his crowd
of sick, possessed, and hungry devotees on
the dusty hillside. Flinging wide the red door,we shuffle dazed into bright sunlight, talking
weather, golf, lunch, and the fine tulips
beside the whizzing traffic on Gordon Drive.
Remembering
Beyond Paradise: The Unweeded Garden
Main Street Rag, March 2020.
< IE base *(s)mer-,
to remember, recallIn what inner world do elves
race up and down library ladders
opening dusty albums as we
try to name the face we just
said hello to, which movie
we saw last Thursday?
Or
do they dig for proteins
packing the precious data,
splice this or that neuron,
replace a blown fuse,
flip the tripped breaker?What miracle that nothing is lost,
mother getting dressed with
bare breasts when we were three,
father plowing the windy West Texas
field, the etched dates of Milton’s
and Shakespeare’s births, lines
from Villon and Yeats.
We
dust off the portrait, re-call,
re-cognize the face, re-collect
the facts, re-color the hat and give
the cheeks a new flush. With each
new take, we remove inept actors,
polish the compliment we treasure,
the running catch in left center
we made forty years ago, major
league, Bobby said.
The story
is the thing, how we got here,
who helped, who hurt, only the
sternest leash reining the imp
who makes and re-makes every
fading scene.
Table of Contents
“An Accidental Poet”
“Taking Leave”
“The Search”
“Early Learning”
“Maundy Thursday”
“Microwave Art”
“Biscuits”
“Reading Palms”
“A Dog’s Life: One”
“Home”
“Teaching: Fall Term”
“Isham’s Will”
“Inventory: Ransom’s Estate”
“Gilbert’s Coffin: Unpaid”
“Second Sons”
“Inmate”
“Autumn Grief”
“He Wasn’t There”
“Drink”
“Taps”
“Sedge Field”
“The Judge”
“When He Was Twelve”
“Theocracy”
“Deus Absconditis“
“The Patriarch”
“Access”
“Neighbor”
“Two Waterfowl”
“Bulldog: A Lenten Discipline”
“The Harness: Bulldog as Romantic Philosopher”
“A Dog’s Life: Two”
“Bulldog: An Elegy”
“In Milton’s Steps”
“Offering”
“Something to Stay Our Minds On”
Reviews
Harry Moore has grabbed a handful of Alabama soil and held it up to the light of memory. In the loam that sifts through his fingers, we intimately know people, places, circumstances that nurture a poet's life, enrich understanding of our own. Bearing the Farm Awayis writing courageous, honest, beautiful. (James E. Cherry, author of Loose Change)
These poems are . . . contemplative reflections of a mature poet dazzled and amazed at the changes that have occurred in himself and . . . his life. . . . [The poems are] clean, clear, and accessible. . . . Moore’s command of language is artfully balanced by an open heart and generous spirit. (James Miller Robinson, author of The Caterpillars at Saint Bernardand Boca del Río in the Afternoon.)
Farming life in the rural south, mid-twentieth century is central to these rich poems. . . . If the book had a subtitle it would be tribute, for grandparents and parents who one day disappear, leaving personal histories and old photos, “smiling as if to dare the world.” Moore’s dreams link a father plowing behind a mule to a grandson clinging to his own father’s leg, joy and grief over time merging in the magic of the poet’s art. (Bill Brown, author of Elementaland Morning Window)
WHY GP CRIES
Beneath the seething August heatbolls of cotton crack, then burstin fluffy locks, green leaves twist,turn brown and fall. Black faces glistenas workers bend to knee-high stalks,plucking the soft fiber from prickly burrs,packing handfuls into the canvas sack they dragtill it’s strutted, then dumped on croaker sheets,tied and weighed at day’s end,three cents a pound. Ice cubes clinkin gallon water jugs passed round. For lunchat Parker’s Store, they eat Viennas, crackers,hoop cheese and drink RCs, riding the crowded pickupto and from the field.One year my father picked six balesalone, he said, three hundred pounds a day,hauled to gin on Saturday, while working nightsat Mt. Vernon Mills. At ten, I picked two hundred,beaming before him as the stillyards leveled steadybeneath the hickory pole we held.My tears live close to homethese days, rising up unannounced whenHallmark says my daughterhas me in her heart, when my grandsontakes the hard grounder and flingsthe ball to first, or when Lear howlsover limp Cordelia, searching for her breath.But most I weep when King’s great dreamrolls in waves of shimmering August lightthrough fields where Ralph, Laura, Earl, Roy,Hershel, Mattie, Pete, and Robertlean dark to rows white for harvest.The vial breaks, the fountains rise, andI have no words but go by water.
REQUIEM
for Marzelle Casaday Moore, 1920-1999
My mother disappeared last weekwent poof, vanished, as ifthe world wiggled its nose.She who bore me, walked me,bought me blue jeans, rodethirty miles to her cotton mill job,washed, ironed, cooked peas, okra,squash, green beans, cornbreadand at Christmas cakesrichly veined with dark chocolate,was gone, absent, nowhereto be seen.All week I waited for her callto say Penny brought vegetables,Lois smashed her fender, Marian’ssurgery went well, the children in the breezewaydidn’t bother her, her brother called,her breath was good today, she’d beglad if I came but she likedto read and didn’t mindbeing alone.But nothing, silence:only, among her things, thispicture of her at twenty, standing straight,head back, arms akimbo,one foot on a car’s bumper, smilingas if to dare the world.
BROTHER
When words begin to flee from him, likedarting doves we used to shoot at, andmemory leaks like a battered milk pail,he asks me to the lawyer’s office with him.‘Mid talk of assets, income, and elder care,his eyes speak his need, and I who marshalwords for my trade inquire, repeat, and clarify.Our births bracketed a war, he in ’39,I in ’44, three uncles fighting across continentsto save the world. Slighter than me but bolder,he was out ahead, fending off my flailing armswhen we fought, elusive when I tried to follow,losing me, getting the girl, escaping ourfather’s eye to make his life his own. I wascautious, quick to beg, hungry for praiseas I beat him at grades, football, and church.He lurked outside the circle while I preachedand stored up accolades.Now he’s returnedto our dead father’s fold, worried at my wildfaith in science, billions of years on earth,fish crawling toward the sky, my hidden Godwho welcomes all, the tattered marriagesuit I wear, fearing he might lose me. Butboyhood days are bedrock, love and gratitudeas real as water welling from a hillside spring.Outside, minutes march like trained soldiers,planets hurtle in orbit, a wife’s arteriesballoon and burst. Inside the office, arounda table cluttered with pads, pens, foldersholding records of a life, we face the lawyer—our little group a circle in quivering fluorescent light.
MOVING ON
. . . be one . . . on whom nothing is lost.Henry James, The Art of FictionYou’ll get past this, they say, as if griefwere a dangerous stretch of road, a canyonwhere ambush might occur. Others say,you’ll get through it, loss being a fog orjungle I can’t see the other side of.Impatient ones say, Get over it already,as if I have only to climb my way acrossa fence or mountain. But I don’t think so.The pain, the guilt, heavy thoughts at 3:00 a.m.have grown familiar. They sink roots in my flesh,grip my bones. They ride my pulsing blood.I’ve found words for the hurt, charmed it,making it sway like a cobra to my music.It hammers away in a secret shop. Evenwhen I move on, the words go with me.
ACCIDENTS HAPPEN
for Clyde Moore, 1904-1974
My ageing father led, like Houdini, a daresome
and charmed life. Forearms, knuckles, fingersbled as wrenches slipped and hammers flew awry.
Luckily the caged raccoon that bit his handand fled was not mad. The coasting chain-saw
that twice lurched into his knee ate mostly cloth.When he checked the whirling lawn mower blade,
it took merest finger tips. The gas can tiltedabove the idling Farmall Super-A rose flaming
past his ear, and when in springtime the tractorrolled topsy turvy like a barrel down the rocky slope,
he somehow floated free. While breath receded,his laughter grew. At three score and ten, his large heart
stopped on its own; a meteor threading crowded skieslanded finally in his bed.
Retreat: A Way Forward
Finishing Line Press, Sept. 2017.
Purchase: Amazon / Author / Finishing Line Press
Table of Contents
“Retreat”
“Creekside Muse”
“Week One”
“The Collector”
“Week Two: Lunar Eclipse”
“Old Journals”
“Summer of Discontent”
“Turning Away”
“Eros”
“Week Three”
“Sunrise, Sunset”
“A Small Voice”
“Deus Absconditis”
“Prayer (I)”
“Sacred Space”
“Week Four: Winding Down at the Occidental”
“The Valley of Shadow”
“Prayer (II)”
“Fear No Evil”
“Departure”
“Legacy”
Retreat: A Way Forward
Finishing Line Press, Sept. 2017.
Purchase: Amazon / Author / Finishing Line Press
Retreat: A Way Forward
Finishing Line Press, Sept. 2017.
Purchase: Amazon / Author / Finishing Line Press
Retreat: A Way Forward
Finishing Line Press, Sept. 2017.
Purchase: Amazon / Author / Finishing Line Press
Retreat: A Way Forward
Finishing Line Press, Sept. 2017.
Purchase: Amazon / Author / Finishing Line Press
Reviews
Retreat: A Way Forward
Finishing Line Press, Sept. 2017.
Purchase: Amazon / Author / Finishing Line Press
In the last poem of his Retreat: A Way Forward, Moore asks, and what of himself will he leave? For me, this is a reflective question that flows through the entire book—each poem a quest, a search, a deep looking at both the present moment and a past generously remembered. The poet's close bond with nature is also a continuous thread, beautifully woven into his curiosity to discover meaning in every moment. Led by an unceasing muse, will she whisper things he must write till dawn, Moore keeps the reader intimately involved, as he dives into lakes, cocoons, old journals and dusty briefcases. This searching is ultimately a means to discover a fluid, renewed faith in life's journey, which embraces twisted grasses, weeds...and trees he's yet to name, as well as the divinity within each of us. (Bonnie Rose Marcus, author of The Luminosity)
There is a still, small voice of wisdom, a “sober undercurrent,” within the poems of Harry Moore’s Retreat: A Way Forward. No longer midway on life’s journey—at an artist residency—he mines a lifetime worth of journals, “slough[ing] off a medley of old/selves” and seeking the clarity of “some lasting form.” Perhaps, as he suggests, we are all trapped in our own cravings; perhaps words, the seeking after them, never really changes anything within the self or within our environments. Nevertheless, Moore seeks a legacy to leave behind that will carry us all forward into “a whole new song”—one that is sacred and spacious and lifted up, despite this wilderness we wander beneath a God-haunted “empty sky.” (Jeff Hardin, author of Small Revolution and Restoring the Narrative)
Table of Contents
“License My Roving Hands”
“As You Like It or GP Goes to London with His Wife”
“Offering”
“Long Distance”
“Sanctum”
“Youngest”
“How His Garden Grows”
“The Viewing”
“Advent”
“Winning”
“Nativity”
“Earthquakes and Aftershocks”
“A Gift”
“A Day with Lillie”
“Here Am I”
“The Bulldog or GP Takes a Lenten Discipline”
“Neighbor”
Bulldog: An Elegy”
“Accidents Happen”
“Nocturne: Pillow Talk or GP Thinks about Body Language . . .”
“GP Orders His Columbarium Niche at St. John’s Church”
Reviews
“Time's Fool, Harry Moore's second chapbook, consists of twenty-four beautifully crafted poems that are both confessional and conversational.
“Grippingly honest and deeply moving, the poems in Time's Fool are by no means dark. They are celebratory and full of light, held together by hope, joy, faith, and always by love . . .
“Moore writes of comfortable domesticity, of family, blended and extended, of children and grandchildren, of birth and death, love and loss, beginnings and endings.” (Penne J. Laubenthal, Alabama Writers’ Forum)
GP'S WIFE DOES NATIONAL BOARDS
So what’s the plan, she says, tapping
a fingernail on her coffee cup, marching
through pages of morning news as I
study high school football scores;
do you have goals, objectives, strategy,
a mission, and are you effective?Her skin is soft, I know, and cool
like swamp oak shade, rich as
ploughed ground in springtime.We could move this wall twelve feet,
she adds, open the sun room, put the pool
by the fence, plant azaleas, and grow
Eden out back; while I, bursting joy’s
week-old grapes, note Goshen lost,
Reeltown beat Beulah, and Leroy is undefeated.Her hands are finely formed and sure,
true as tall pine, light as evening
breeze across a summer porch.Flicking crumbs, I clip play-off
grids, tasting pleasure for weeks to come.
Next term, she says, I’m teaching part-time
at two colleges, chairing my department,
doing National Boards, becoming president
of City Educators, and taking the girls abroad.
What do you plan to do?Beside her tapping foot, arched and brown
with beach-front sun, our fattened cat
lies twitching in his dream.[First published in the English Journal]
USHERING AT EASTER OR GP NOTICES HIS STEPDAUGHTER
Lilies burst from ends of pews markingthe way the cross moves to the altarand the tall bright window where St. Johnwrites gospel in his blue book.As trumpets rise toward dark roofbeams,hull of my ship these thirty years,I see my daughter across the crowded church,hair gone darker now, arms brownfrom weeks of soccer sun, her form slightin the straight frock, standingbetween her daughters, now shoulder high.She was oldest of the fourin our mix and match, already tenwhen we met, shy, running fast,fighting for her brother, smilingwhen I caught her eye.Steady as the clock that woke herevery day for school, she kept quietwhen voices roared. She was pisces,I a virgo in a house of lions.In broken French, my minor key,we tossed words like keep-awayabove the family’s head. Pas-pereshe called me, childhood jokeas deep as blood.Driving the red Datsun, she crashedon geometry’s hard proofs, fleeingto her father’s country house one term.Later, north of childhood and college,she drove nights to us through rain,infant and toddler like loads of nectaron the homeward flight.After church, when children crowdher mother’s tiny kitchen, jostlingfor grapes or ice cream,she’ll stand beside the glowing heaterjust outside the tug and push.Across the room, we will smile,glad for laughter, food, casual talk,hearts grown firm with years.[First published in The Alabama Literary Review]
A SUMMER'S DAY
High in the La Platas, by spruce and fir,my son shows me relics of the Lucky Moon Mine:tan-colored tailings, like sawdust, rustediron bucket, corroded tin rooffrom a collapsed cabin, and a growingcover of currant bushes. In August sun,he waves toward distant mountain rims,ribbons of switchback road, sheer slopesdown which he boarded last winter.Fingering rocks, he speaks of glaciers,granite, limestone, fault linesup which the molten metal surged.Behind us, thunder jolts the earth.When he was four, he piled flint and sandstoneby my mother’s door, salvagefrom a gravel road we walked.She left them there for weeks, she said.I’ve fled my Eastern classroom where languageis my trade, he his kitchen-concrete shop.We’re out for alpine air, chasing lost years.I climb the slope, snapping cheap pictures,naming phlox and cinquefoil, while far belowhe probes the earth, kneeling, peering,tossing, gathering rocks. With loaded arms,he yells we’d better get to the jeepor he will break it down.At the treeline a hailstorm hits,marble ice pinging the hood,drumming the canvas top, fillingwood and ruts till we bounce and slidelaughing down slopes, through sharp turnsof the ancient road. All around us,beneath the ghostly aspens, the groundis white, like some winter worldwhere time has stopped.[First published in The Alabama Literary Review]
TIME'S FOOL
“Daddy?” she said, her cell phone voicerising toward some question,“We’re getting married. David’staking off Thanksgiving and we’regoing to St. Simon’s. You canhave a reception for us later, andMom can too.”She didn’t say she missed mewhen I left, the golden books we readwhen she was two, songs we sang, orwaffles we two made while others sleptor that weekend roads were long andhouses far. She didn’t say she needed mewith nouns and numbers and thunderstormsthat shook her sleep. She didn’t askhow we who bore her could not speak,why in our years apart we built no bridgea child might walk, no placea girl might marry.In the tape she sends of palm treesand marbled seaside houses,they stand outside before a manin black robe, who calls them by their names,wind scuffing the hidden mike and blowingher dark hair. When she pledges lifelong love,through riches, hunger, health and time’s slow change,her voice trembles, her eyes glisten,and I weep.[First published in The Alabama Literary Review]
Table of Contents
“The Search”
“Why GP Cries”
“When He Was Twelve”
“The Patriarch”
“Requiem”
“GP Writes an Elegy”
“Sedge Field”
“Fall”
“Valediction”
“Character Reference”
“Second Sons”
“Something to Stay Our Minds On”
“What It Is Like”
“Acknowledgments”
Reviews
“The naming of things, associated with Moore’s father, is a primary theme in the collection. For the poet, to call things in the natural world by their proper names and to understand their essential nature is to connect with his past. . .
“In verse artistically rich and highly readable, Moore has accomplished more than many authors manage in much more space. Both the insight and the felicity he demonstrates will, I think, draw many readers to this volume.” (Norman McMillan, Alabama Writers’ Forum)
“Harry Moore’s poetic voice is soft-spoken, gentle, authentic and honest as he allows us to accompany him on his journey through time and space, a friendly voice inviting us into his particular world, a voice that may tremble but doesn’t break at the current of sentiment that surges through the poems.” (James Miller Robinson, Main Street Rag)
WHAT HE WOULD CALL THEM
My father walked on sandy soil afterhorse-drawn plows, growing cotton, corn,watermelons, fighting bermuda, crabgrass,kudzu, crows, boll weevils, and cutworms.He sawed oak and hickory for firewood,mulberry for fence posts.Wounded at play, I walkthe streets of my subdivisionwhich sits on farms and fields.Fescue crowds my bermuda on the north, wherefour white oaks, five post oaks, and a red oaktower houseless on a sloping vacant lot.A glossy blackbird with yellow eyedigs at my wet lawn, a wormdangling from his bill.Killdees scream keenlyby the drainage ditch, a mockingbirdsings in the persimmon tree by the mailbox.Beyond the hackberry tangled withcow-itch vines and orange trumpet blossomsa bobwhite whistles pertly.Out back, a yellowhammer beatsa rat-a-tat-tat on a tall dead pine.Sumac, sassafrass, and wild plumpush from an untilled field onto Woodland Road;the field is awash with whitequeen anne’s lace. Fee-larkswith flat heads and yellow breastswhistle atop gables of two-storey houses,and purple martins dive and dipin the darkening rain clouds.A black-crested kingbird catchesa fly in midflight.These names are of no use to me. Weedsdo not threaten my cotton, I’m no florist,my firewood comes precut, oak and cherrydumped in the drive. I don’thunt birds for food.But I savor straight blackgumsamong the taller poplars, I relishthe sad cooing of dovesin the pine thicket rife with honeysuckle;I search books for the proper nameof white-breasted bee-martins; I dragbranches home to distinguish ash and elm,I wonder what poisonous past christeneddaisies fleabane. I beg a friend to say for methe exquisite globed yellow blossoms of hop clover.Beside my concrete drive, in fresh topsoil,small ragweed grows, with johnson grass,morning glories, jimson and careless weed:green chain of yearsacross which my father speaks the namesworn smooth with long holding.[First published in the Journal of the Southeastern Conference on English in the Two-Year College]
FATHERS AND SONS (FOR DOZIER PRYOR)
“Sometimes when I’m eating,” he said,“or sitting by the fireI get up and go out in the yardbecause I don’t know if he’s warm orhas anything to eat.”We sat on split-bottom chairsbefore a fireplace where oakand hickory smoldered on blackened firedogsagainst the evening chill.Under graying hair curled tightlyagainst his head, his face was linedlike oak leaves in December, darkas the coffee I drank every morningwith biscuits dipped in cane syrupbefore boarding the bus to the county schoolfive miles away. His full lipsworked nervously, hands turningthe felt hat on his lap.He had not seen my father’s black and tan foxhoundlost three days since in the Big Woodsbut wouldn’t we come in and sit a spell.His boy had gone to the army last spring.I had seen him ride by our house on Saturday mornings,buggy wheels crunching the gravel roadbehind the steady brown horse steppingtoward town six miles away.Returning at dusk wrappedin army overcoat and blankethe bowed deeply with a courtesybefitting the owner of his own homewho did not pick other men’s cotton.Now, in the room that smelledof woodsmoke, lye soap, warm bodies,and years of fatback, crackling bread,greens, and sweet potatoes bakedslowly into its pine walls, he spoke,“I can’t eat when he’s hungry, I can’t restwhen he’s tired and cold.”Korea and Topeka were far away.Selma slept. Rosa waitedin the back of the bus.On the hard clay road,in the cab of the Ford pickup movingpast pines and scrub oaks towardthe black grammar school,I searched my father’s facefor words I could not see.[First published in Teaching English in the Two-Year College]
TAKING LEAVE
“I can’t go on,” she said, leaningon my father’s shoulder. They stoodby the hickory tree we’d cut, wherehe told me not to ride the crosscut sawwe pulled back and forth, laying up a storeof wood for coming winter cold.“I’ve got to have some rest,” she said.She was out of season in our world,always gone before the school busdropped us off at home, on her jobat Pepperell Mills, where she movedbriskly round a large spooling machine,her flying hands tying up ends,exceeding all production goals, thencoming home at midnight while we slept,laying out socks, shirts, handkerchiefs,and quarters my brother and I foundas we arose and went to school.She slept till eight, then washed loads of jeans,cooked roast, peas, and cornbread,and ironed shirts for church. From Sunday nightto Saturday, we moved like phantom loverstoo far off to touch, drinking joylike the cold sweet tea she madeif we came home from school one dayto find her there.With surprise and wonder, we watchedher walk down the hill where my brother’s sledin summer sped on pinestraw toward the spring below.Her blouse was white and sleeveless,with a wide elastic belt, a narrow skirtthat reached below the knee,white socks, and sandals with rubber soles,her hair drawn back into a bun, nothingloose or flaring when she dressed for work.Without a word, my father reachedto hold her, in sawdust by the stump.“It’ll be okay,” he said; “we’ll make it fine.”My brother held a limb he draggedand I stood by the saw. For a long minutewe felt our world reshape itself, our rising joytempered by this strangeness. Could shebe taking leave to be with us?
ADAM GOES WALKING ON LOOKOUT MOUNTAIN
He thought if he could name them all,take them in—tall horseweed in dusty heatbeside the county road, goosefoot, star-shapedsweetgum, hop clover, queen anne’s lace panels,dishlike, turned outward to the skies, plantain’sspindly seed stalks, poke salad, fleabane, goldentickseed sunflowers ragged at each petal’s edge,wild geranium rusting brown, a stone chimney—all its fires gone cold— in a grove of red oak,day lilies bending east, bull nettle, a fieldof ripened wheat dark with pools of ragweed,deep-lobed sassafrass, bald rounded boulderswhere the glacier scraped them clean;if he could catch the creaking tones of titmouse,the pert whistle of jo-ree, a thrush’s plaintiveflute at dusk; if he could say the salty tasteof oyster, the pulpy sweetness of cantaloupe,the cleansing burst of chardonnay on the tongue;if he could show how the smooth contoursof her breast formed a map of all their years—paradise would be his again, the garden safewithin its walls, the way it was before he knewthat he knew.[First published in The South Carolina Review]
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Calhoun Community College Writers’ Conference- Featured Writer, Oct, 29-30, 2013
Review by Dr. Penne Laubenthal
Maureen Egan Writers Exchange Award from Poets & Writers, 2014
Reading at McNally Jackson Bookstore, New York, Oct. 19, 2014
Poets & Writers Blog, February 2015
Jentel Artist Residency, Banner, Wyoming, Sept. 15-Oct.13, 2015
Alabama Book Festival, Montgomery, Alabama, April 11, 2015
Louisville Conference of Literature and Culture, February 20, 2016 and February 24, 2018
Long Choosing and Beginning Late (Paradise Lost 9.26)Posted: Jan 09, 2015Winner of the 2014 Poets & Writers Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award for poetry, Harry Moore is a retired community college English professor. His poems have appeared in Teaching English in the Two-Year College, English Journal, Alabama Literary Review, POEM, the Cape Rock, the South Carolina Review, Avocet, Anglican Theological Review, Main Street Rag, theSow’s Ear Poetry Review, and other journals. He is the author of two chapbooks, What He Would Call Them, published in September 2013 by Finishing Line Press, and Time’s Fool, published in January 2014 by Mule on a Ferris Wheel Press. Moore serves as an assistant editor of Poem, a literary magazine in Huntsville, Alabama. He lives with his wife, Cassandra, in Decatur, Alabama.When Bonnie Rose Marcus from Poets & Writers called in early April last year to say that I had won the Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award for poetry, I was at first astonished—then elated—then overwhelmingly grateful. I’m in what Dylan Thomas would call my seventieth year to heaven. I had taught the masters—Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Dickinson, Yeats, Eliot—to community college freshmen and sophomores for forty years. Seizing moments from a regimen of lectures, student conferences, committee meetings, and paper grading, I had scribbled fragments into a journal, publishing my first poem in 1991 at age forty-seven. From then until my retirement in 2009, I managed to complete and publish one or two poems a year.Although retirement and a monthly poetry workshop increased my production—including the publication of two chapbooks—I had no idea I might win the WEX Award. Learning that my voice reached across miles and mountains, across yawning generation gaps, and across gender, social, economic, and ethnic lines affirmed for me the value of two decades of hard work and opened real possibilities for the future.
My week in New York City in October planned and guided by Poets & Writers was, from start to finish, a series of wonders. I experienced the efficiency and warmth of the P&W staff, especially Bonnie Rose Marcus and Lynne Connor. I got to know and appreciate fellow Alabamian and talented fiction winner Bryn Chancellor. I saw Thurber’s drawings preserved on the wall of the New Yorker suite of offices. I gazed over Manhattan from the nineteenth-floor balcony of New Directions, publisher of William Carlos Williams. I listened to literary agent Georges Borchardt describe his odyssey from Berlin to Paris to New York sixty years earlier. My wife and I stayed in the lovely Library Hotel.I read at McNally Jackson Bookstore,and was introduced by poetry judge and fellow Southerner Evie Shockley. I chatted over lunch with poet Alicia Ostriker; over drinks with Martha Rhodes of Four Way Books; over coffee in the Village with Davidson Garrett, the taxi driver poet; and over dinner in Soho with Pulitzer Prize winner Vijay Seshadri. On the last day, I walked a mile through Central Park among falling sycamore leaves to lunch with benefactor Maureen Egen and others. And all the while I knew that a month of leisure and seclusion at Jentel Artist Residency in Wyoming awaited me in 2015. The week was a joy, and I couldn’t wait to get back to the writing desk.Although to our modern ears the bouncy optimism of Robert Browning’s “Rabbi Ben Ezra” sounds jingly and hollow—“Grow old along with me! / The best is yet to be”—I like to think the creative impulse and the poetic voice can survive the shocks of advancing age. The WEX Award tells me this is so—that in age no less than in youth, in the words of Emily Dickinson, we “dwell in possibility / A fairer house than prose.”This award is generously supported by Maureen Egen, a member of the Poets & Writers Board of Directors, and retired Deputy Chairman and Publisher of Hachette Book Group, USA.From http://www.pw.org/content/longchoosingandbeginninglateparadiselost_926
“A Momentary Stay” : Musings on the Poetry of Harry MoorePosted: Nov 06, 2013It was like old home week at the 13th Annual Writers’ Conference at Calhoun Community College when I gathered along with longtime colleagues and former students, now professors themselves, and guests to hear my good friend Dr. Harry Moore read and talk about his poetry.Dr. Moore chaired the English Department at Calhoun until his retirement in 2009. He did not begin writing poetry in earnest until around twenty years ago and now has published his first chapbook “What He Would Call Them” (Finishing Line Press, Georgetown, KY, 2013). This slim volume contains seventeen beautifully crafted and frankly confessional poems in the vein of Robert Lowell, and others, but at the same time they are also narrative and conversational, reminiscent of the poems of Robert Frost. Most have rural settings and are populated with characters from his past (father, mother, brother) as well as his contemporary friends and family, his children and grandchildren, and his wife, Cassandra, also a teacher. Moore’s husband/wife poems tend to restore trust in marriage for even the most cynical of readers.As both a scholar and a poet, Moore brings the best of the two traditions together in his work–classical and modern literature and the equally bountiful experience of his own life with its roots deep in rural Alabama. He draws on this powerful dual heritage to ground his poems in the inheritance of the past and to connect them to the dynamics of growth, struggle, loss, and change of contemporary life. Structurally, Moore’s poetry is much like the free verse of T. S. Eliot, in that it has a “ghost of a meter behind it.” That “ghost” is primarily iambic pentameter, the predominant rhythm of our ordinary speech.My friend Bonnie Roberts, herself an accomplished and widely published poet, writes that Moore’s poems speak in a voice “often reminiscent of Wendell Berry and Seamus Heaney” and that Moore understands not only the role of “naming things” but also the importance of “those moments between naming—when we look, smell, taste, touch, and listen to the world which surrounds us in nameless mystery.”Moore conceded in his opening remarks that poets are notoriously unreliable when discussing their own work. Perhaps, he suggested, they themselves may not know exactly what the poem means, they may have forgotten its actual genesis, or they may even lie outright if it suits their purposes. Nevertheless, poets are expected to speak about poetry, especially their own. As for his own poems, Moore says that they are an attempt to “salvage” something from the past. He sees poems acting like a kind of “freeze frame,” attempting to rescue something from the current of time.Moore called on poets such as Wordsworth and Frost to help him elucidate his point by quoting Wordsworth’s observation that “spots of time” from the past can make the present moment new and Frost’s famous line that a poem is a “momentary stay against confusion.” Not, Moore quipped, as a student once called it, “a momentary state of confusion.” The role of the poem, Moore reiterated, is “to clarify,” to “interpret” experience so that it becomes even more meaningful. A poem should also “purge.” It should be cathartic. T. S. Eliot, one of Moore’s favorite poets, said of his modern classic The Waste Land: ” I wrote The Waste Land simply to relieve my own feelings.” As Moore spoke, I was I reminded of Alexander Pope’s description of good poetry in his Essay on Criticism (itself a poem): “what oft was thought but ne’er so well express’d.”Moore confided that he had not begun writing poetry seriously until midlife when many tragedies seemed to happen all at once. In his poem “GP Writes an Elegy,” Moore wrote of the death of friends from cancer as well as the loss of youth and a past that is forever gone. Toward the end of the poem, GP (Graveyard Poet) relieves his angst and the growing shadow of death in his life, by pumping himself up “with tales of prowess, conquest, field goals,…like some scop drunk on autumn wine.” Many of us have asked the question of how we can cope with lost times, lost friendships, lost youth, the impending shadow of death. I believe that if we are among the fortunate ones, we write.How fortuitous that the day of the Writers’ Conference happened to be a glorious autumn day. Fall is Moore’s favorite season, a “glorious orgy of death,” but also a harbinger of new beginnings. Moore reminisced about the starting of a new school year, the “sense of possibility” inherent in the season. In his poem “Fall” one becomes fully aware of the double meaning of the word “fall,” as in the sense of “overreaching” like Icarus. In the poem, the poet/teacher looks out over his class of young students and wonders what they are thinking and thinks to himself “How can I ask….” The poem is ripe with allusions to Frost’s “After Apple Picking,” W H Auden’s poem “Musee’ Des Beaux Arts,” and Marlowe (Dr. Faustus) and Milton, who declared in Paradise Lost that his object was “to justify the ways of God to man.”Moore’s poems, born out of classical literature and his own past, are frankly confessional and deeply emotional. I am not easily moved to tears but I felt a lump growing in my throat as lines in Moore’s poems captured moments that mirrored so many similar moments in my own life and brought to me , as Wordsworth would say, “thoughts that do lie too deep for tears.” When Moore writes of the hardscrabble life of his father (as in “The Search”) and the willing and relentless sacrifices of his mother (as in “Taking Leave”) who would labor all night at the textile mill, seeing them whenever she could steal a little time from sleep and work, I was reminded of Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays,” one of the most painfully beautiful poems I have ever read.At one point in his talk, offering a caveat for his own poetry, Moore quoted Edgar Arlington Robinson (of Richard Cory fame), who once commented about his poetry, “I am a trifle solemn in my verses .” The line is meant to be humorous in its obvious understatement, but let me hasten to say that Moore’s verses are by no means glum. They are poignant and at times painful, wistful and yet resigned, and held together firmly by love and the glorious gift of memory and language. At the conclusion of Archibald MacLeish’s Pulitzer prize winning drama J.B. when the world lies in ashes and he has lost everything, MacLeish has J.B.’s wife Sarah utter these words: “You wanted justice and there was none—only love…..Blow on the coal of the heart and we’ll see by and by….”The final poem in the chapbook is entitled “Adam Goes Walking on Lookout Mountain.” I think the poem summarizes everything I have been trying to convey about the poetry of Harry Moore. It begins, “He thought if he could name them all/ take them in….. ” and concludes with the lines “Paradise would be his again, the garden safe/ within its walls, the way it was before he knew/that he knew.”Harry Moore is currently working on his second chapbook entitled “Times’ Fool.” The poems in this volume clearly acknowledge Moore’s literary predecessors, among them Shakespeare and particularly John Donne, whose life has much in common with Moore’s own. Moore, who grew up the son of a farmer and grandson of a preacher in Reeltown, Alabama, and who took degrees from Rice, Auburn, and Middle Tennessee State, now lives in Decatur, Alabama, with his wife of thirty years. He has been published in numerous literary magazines and serves as assistant editor of POEM magazine.By Penne J. LaubenthalFrom http://swampland.com/posts/view/title:amomentarystaymusingsonthepoetryofharry_moore
