Customer Reviews

Slipping Out of Bloom

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For those wondering what poetry has to do with real life, Moore provides the answer; poetry is not removed from life, but of it, in all its joy and pain.

Slipping Out of Bloom is an extended meditation on acceptance: whether recounting a blossom slipping out of bloom, or a body slipping into pain, Moore bears witness with a quiet grace to the present with its "beauty so intense it didn't look real" or with its "fierce pain when deep called to deep / and there was no reply."

Moore wrestles with the angel of doubt and despair and comes away blessed by the knowledge that, "at some point you make peace with it / your life as it is, with all it offers you."

This wisdom is hard-earned, but the key seems to be in surrender, just as the blossom slips from the tree: "How /willingly it becomes / and becomes." Or again, like silencing the engine and letting go of the brake to be pulled by car up Magnetic Hill.

Moore is drawn to the divine within the quotidian--"Hold the jewel of the night / in your open hand"-- and it is this rejoicing in what is given that enables her to embrace this painful process of becoming. Rather than succumb to the succor of suicide, Moore chooses instead "the agony / of healing." This brave and radical act requires the letting-go of expectation, coupled with mature appreciation for what is:
"...when...warmth on hilltops / having clung like honey / to every vestige of light / at last, lets go/ then I, too, buoy in the wake / of the passing day."

Moore affirms that earth is, indeed, the right place for love, yet with wry humor she also affirms that the ephemeral is good enough and indeed, as good as it gets: "I don't love this world so much / that I want to stay forever."

Like the pear blossom she describes gently separating from its branch, Julie Moore's tender poems slip from her pen and into our consciousness. Her poems are acts of attention, paying heed to the world's finite beauty. Her ear is so finely tuned that she hears the "cello / humming from each oak leaf." Moore is not afraid to ask questions, especially ones of faith, and even though she has an illness she likens to the Bad Lands of Dakota, "pain piercing every minute," she writes, "Say it, oh do say it, and today I will believe." Going back to the pear tree, Moore writes, "How / willingly it becomes // and becomes," and we willingly come along with her, too, in this haunting debut book.

In my life, Julie Moore has been both a teacher and a friend, and I could write a great deal about the lessons I've learned from her, her ethos, the depth of experience and skill and work that I know have gone into this collection. But I will limit my comments here to the book itself and suggest that if you have a chance to attend a reading or workshop led by Julie, take it!

Slipping Out of Bloom is really just a lovely book full of quiet, lyrical poems of remembrance, celebration, lament, and hope. Moore's combined eye for detail and skill with the sound and shape of language somehow allows her to explore the mingled beauty and pain of life in delightful cadences. The poem "Becoming," for instance, which offers the collection its title phrase, begs to be read aloud--repeatedly--and contemplated for both its delicious feel on one's lips and its wonder at the lesson of a pear tree's change: "Spring-thick with snowy / blossoms, the ornamental // pear tree slowly slips / out of bloom ...."

This is a collection that dances with faith while refusing self-congratulation. It interrogates suffering without succumbing to facile answers. It celebrates Midwestern beauty without sentimentalism. Its hope is hard-earned: in other words, it is honest and full of arrestingly lovely turns of phrase. Finally--and I mean this as high praise--it is eminently readable. I recommend that you buy this book, and read it, and read it again.