reviewed on July 30, 2025
In publishing their fifth collection from Jim Moore, dating back to his 2005 Lightning at Dinner, Graywolf honors their relationship with a writer whom they would never have signed today, not so much because of his demographic profile—although one can consult their catalog—but because the poems themselves, in their Billy Collins-esque ease, jar with much of the other work they publish.
Anecdotal observations in the scenic mode, the poems in Enter move through more or less nimble juxtapositions—“meanwhile,” “many years later,” “down the street”—toward epiphanies insistent on hope and beauty despite the catastrophe of contemporary experience. In Enter, a book concerned with our entrances into and exits from this world, Moore longs to believe in some higher, structuring logic, "that what matters in this world has already happened // and will go on happening forever." That aspiration shapes the book's expert organization, so that Enter becomes an exit by its end, with Moore declaring that "[i]t was good being born, but this thing / about coming to the end is yet / another kind of happiness."
Such pollyannaism does open the collection to charges of disingenuousness, eliding as it does the existential and ecological pressures of the present day; “an ode always sleeps inside / an elegy,” Moore offers, though one wonders at present if that is exactly and “always” the case. Likewise, a poem about an elderly man carrying a skateboard concludes as follows:
Maybe that man was an angel
whose wings had fallen off.
[…]
Something inside us remembers
what it is like to be eternal. Is it
good luck or bad that we carry
that memory with us for as long as we live?
One sees in such a passage why Rebecca Morgan Frank, writing for Lit Hub, argues that “Moore’s experienced touch is light and concise without minimizing the substance of his inquiries.”
On the other hand—and acknowledging that few reviewers who are also poets will neg a Graywolf book—"minimizing the substance of his inquiries" would seem precisely to describe such observations as “It is sad / how many people in my country huddle together in a stadium / for comfort," an observation to which I take not only intellectual but personal affront. One wonders too about Frank’s praise for the book’s “sincerity,” as if earnest and simplified sentiment were equal to “sincere” thought and feeling, and as if “sincerity” itself were a virtue.
Enter is at its most substantial when it seems truly to reckon with or plumb the depths and darknesses of experience, and to bring out the shame and despair of this life. "I would like to have risen more fully," Moore writes in "A Clear View," "to the occasion of my own birth." In "Mother," published in The New Yorker, Moore describes how “at night we walk to the river / and stare down into the black current / which has reached flood stage / and sweeps everything before it.” Here, Moore channels a misanthropy evocative in its power of James Wright and John Berryman.
In a colophon to its books, Graywolf describes itself as “publish[ing] risk-taking, visionary writers,” by which the press no doubt means such ostensibly "risky" texts as one finds even on the first page of the catalog linked above. The true risk here, however, is to have stuck with Moore for twenty years in the face of market pressures. As I have argued in this forum, Graywolf afforded Tony Hoagland similar respect with his last book, risking backlash in order to publish a writer who helped to make the press what it is.
For this, Graywolf should be commended, and should be encouraged toward truer and more trenchant risk-taking, beyond the bounds of sincerity—or, as it is also known, "authenticity."