Darling: Poems

The second collection from the poet Honor Moore, Darling is the kind of poetry that refuses to stay quiet, full of moments so gorgeous and brave you can't resist their power. From the very first pages, there is an inescapable intensity. Hard and melodic, chilly with loss and burning with sensual heat, Moore's words have a profound veracity as she takes on subjects such as longing, death, and sexual desire with a deeply passionate consciousness. Every poem in Darling is radiant with glassy precision. A woman's hair is the color of raw wood, a dead friend is remembered by how he placed objects in a room, two lovers "fall together like answers." Hers are effortless metaphors that pull at your breath, and her ease in conjuring them is simply stunning. Moore's poems always generate excitement, appearing in dozens of publications, including The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Open City, Conjunctions, and American Poetry Review.

Publishers Weekly

While most of her bios list her as a poet first and foremost, Moore has published critical essays and a biography of her grandmother, the painter Margarett Sargent, in addition to her previous book of poems. This second collection sticks closely and honestly to two fields: painters and painting, and love and sex. Moore's own close attention to color and arrangement distinguish poems on work by Degas and others, and enliven others based on personal memories. One autobiographical lyric tracks "the pale gray stain/ his eyes leave in my dreams"; another juxtaposes a remembered lover with Rousseau's "Sleeping Gypsy" "I was wearing green. Nineteen./ Flat cheap light illuminates/ a male, twenty-one." Moore (whose first book of poems was called Memoir) also evokes sometimes explicitly, sometimes obliquely a great range of sexual and romantic experience, from date rape and abortion at Yale in the 1960s to lesbian love in middle age. (The collection also includes intimate elegies on family members and friends, some dead from AIDS.) Noted poet and translator Richard Howard praises Moore's "sensuous revelry" in a brief, admiring foreword, but Moore's openness and visual gestures often outrun the actual turns of phrase here: poems about the speaker's body veer into stock myth-making: "moon and/ goddess, tides and gravity,/ oh bring our blood!" Other poems remember passionate lovers with lines like these: "As we stood there, she pulled me toward her/ by the belt and thrust in with her hand"; "We met at a small supper outside Paris/ one late August"; "Dear one, I have met a man who touches me so it burns." Many readers will prize Moore's brave directness, or admire its political implications; others,however, will wonder whether the poems do justice to a complicated life. (Sept.) Forecast: Sex still sells, and this collection should be no exception. Moore is a well-known figure in the art and literary worlds, which should lead to relatively extensive coverage. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Honor Moore is a poet and the author of The Bishop's Daughter. She lives in New York City and teaches at the New School and Columbia University.