Customer Reviews

The Bears of Paris

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The Bears of Paris is a modern match for Dante's _Inferno_. The poems in this collection give us today's Man-in-the-city in the character of Fatslug dodging the slings and arrows of our fates, often pierced and wounded. Yet the poems reaffirm our essential humanity, the struggle to love and to be loved. While thoroughly rooted in our times, the poems also connect us with events from history, revealing the nature of suffering. Moore takes on the subject of evil and Man's inhumanity to man with Swiftian wit. Miles Moore has a deadly satiric eye for human failings, the interactions of daily life, intended and unintentional cruelties, and yet writes with much empathy of the consequent pain inflicted on the victims. Many of the poems such as "Two Men", "I love Barbie Taylor, T. Mc" and "Dead Boy in the Road at Fredericksburg" deserve to be included in anthologies of the best American poetry. "Dead Boy.." ends with this panoramic fade on the photograph from the Civil War: "Through the millenia the murdered march/ To someone else's tune and memory/ And through some other guy's triumphal arch./ You and they are no one. You're history./ Repeating rifles always bear repeating./ The silent beast that ate you keeps on eating."

This is a fascinating and satisfying collection with poetry that gives us much to ponder.