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Public Poetry, Kevin Walzer's meditations on poetry, publishing, business, and other creative pursuits
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Kevin Walzer, a poet, poetry publisher, husband, and father.
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Fri, 12 Oct 2007
Book of the Day: The Dangerous Corner by Richard Moore
Richard Moore's collection The Dangerous Corner is elegiac and graceful. Moore is a master of formal poetry, and the poems in The Dangerous Corner are strong in their attention to meter and, at times, rhyme.
Yet Moore has an undeniable gift for contemporary speech within the context of formal meter. "Dry Season" is a compelling example of his craft:
Dry Season
December. The sun is gone.
The water shrinks, like the gums
of an old man. Bank bares--
rocks packed tight--like teeth.
The clouds are turning pink.
I watch them through chain link fence.
They're shut away from me,
distant as a Titian painting.
He saw them first. And the pond,
his also--mellow, ripe.
All that, not mine, taken.
So much! Where are you now?
With your lover in that cute
tearoom where the others
all. . . Our daughter described it.
No, that is not you. . .and I too
grow other. . . I too grasp. . .
at Titian's clouds, till they
--as, watching me, they must--
turn gray, gray now as dust.
Bravo.
The Dangerous Corner is a book to sit down with on a melancholy day, when sad music and contemplation go hand in hand. It is bracing and clarifying.