Keynote
Jim Moore’s poems “are chips of reality, obsidian flakes of the heart and mind” (Jane Hirshfield)
Book Title
Prognosis
Subtitle
Poems
Cover Image
- “These are poems of arresting lyric reportage; whimsical, tragic, a touch fantastical.”—Daisy Fried, The New York Times Book Review
Poem Excerpt
I know I call in a time of great sadness and anger,
in a time of such fear: still,
if you can manage to answer
we might talk into the long winter night.
I will still be here when the lights on the bridge
go out and the pink flash at dawn disappears,
when the geranium’s single flower bends over double
under the weight of its own blossoming.
—“I Will Still Be Here”
in a time of such fear: still,
if you can manage to answer
we might talk into the long winter night.
I will still be here when the lights on the bridge
go out and the pink flash at dawn disappears,
when the geranium’s single flower bends over double
under the weight of its own blossoming.
—“I Will Still Be Here”
Body
In his eighth collection, the celebrated poet Jim Moore looks into unrelenting darkness where moments of tenderness and awe illuminate, at times suddenly like lightning in the night, at others, more quietly, as the steady glow of streetlights in a snowstorm. These are poems of both patience and urgency, of necessary attendance and helpless exuberance in the breathing world—something rare in contemporary poetry. Written in Minneapolis amid the COVID-19 pandemic’s masked and distanced loneliness, after the police murder of George Floyd, as an empire comes to an end, Prognosis turns toward the living moment as a surprising source of abundance. Here we find instances of essential human connection animated by a saving grace that pulls us back from depression and despair. Contemplating with playful wisdom what it is to brave the later years of one’s life, Moore revels in the possibilities of joy and mourns the limits of our capacity to greet the unknown with resolve and wonder. The prognosis Moore foresees demands continued stillness, continued movement: “Also known as going home,” he writes. “Also known as getting over yourself.”
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About the Author
Credit: @ 2020 JoAnn Verburg
Praise
- “[In Prognosis,] Moore isn't telling readers to look away from contemporary realities, but rather to invest care and compassion in the present moment and the people within arm's reach. . . . In Moore's work, readers will discover that clarity and mystery are not mutually exclusive as they encounter luminous images packed with the complexity of life deeply lived.”—Elizabeth Hoover, Star Tribune
- “There is a stunning clarity to Jim Moore’s latest poems. . . . Poised at the threshold of mortality, ‘unencumbered / by thoughts of what might have been,’ these poems hover between transient beauty and transfigured time; they embrace and let go of ‘what was never ours to keep.’”—Arthur Sze
