Red Shoes

ISBN: 0393059855

Author: Moore, Honor

Condition: New

From Publishers Weekly Sometimes vivid, haunting and condensed, sometimes given to talky anecdotes, Moore's third collection overall marks an advance on 2001's Darling. Strongly sexual archetypes and colorful scenes from disturbing fairy tales light up the short lines of the first, and best, poems. "Hotel Brindisi" makes the poet into a mermaid: "My gold tail swam dark green water." Quatrains about waking up at the beach approach echolalia: "Bodies in water or love/ Rub of blue glue on a girl's dove." Three longer poems record three of Moore's unsettling dreams in clear, terse prose. A sequence entitled "Beauté" memorializes the Austrian photographer and world traveler Inge Morath (1923-2002), whom Moore befriended late in life. Occupying the second half of the book, this sequence mixes brief, hallucinatory verse about death and grief with long-lined recollections of Morath's words and deeds: "When I met her I was thirty-nine," Moore recalls, "though now I'm no younger than she was// the day she came to take the first portrait." Here Moore's verse can seem artless ("every poem delineated circumstances/ in which my friend now found herself") though its strength of feeling remains. As in The White Blackbird (Moore's biography of her grandmother, the American painter Margarett Sargent), Moore's attention to visual patterns, to how things look and how they appeal to the eye, remains intense throughout. (June) Copyright Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Product Description A third collection by the author of Darling returns readers to the terrain of earlier works and features the writer's erotic and surreal lyrics, dreamlike meditations, and sequence of elegies, in a volume that evinces an unfolding story told through interlinked, recurring images. From Booklist Moore's third collection begins with a tango and never loses the keyed-up, elegant, ritualized eroticism of the push and pull of that dangerous courtship dance. The abrupt turns, the dagger stares, the barely sustained restraint, all this is found in Moore's sexy, telegraphic, edgy, and rapt poetry. Gloves, suits, silks, shoes--all are talismans of desire, tantalizing and thwarting. Reveries, memories, and dreams pitch from the vividly concrete to the uninhibitedly surreal as the poet dreams of her deceased parents, remembers a family home, gazes out windows at sunsets and rain, and considers the touch of fugitive lovers. Recurrent images appear like birds landing on ledges or suddenly remembered songs, as the poet's musings shift from the erotic to the spiritual in "Gnostic," the aesthetic in an homage to Wallace Stevens, and the elegiac in a graceful cycle of poems portraying photographer and friend Inge Morath. Exquisitely visual, cuttingly witty, Moore's poems are at once cool and searing. Donna SeamanCopyright American Library Association. All rights reserved Review Grief and desire flow together here, becoming a single mesmerizing red-blue flame. -- Carol Muske-Dukes, Los Angeles Times About the Author Honor Moore teaches in the graduate writing programs at the New School and the School of the Arts at Columbia University.