Review of Lost Republics by Paul Perry in The Irish Times
ALAN JUDE MOORE is a young poet from Dublin whose experience of living in Moscow provides the subject matter for his award-winning first collection, Black State Cars , and for this, his second collection, Lost Republics . The social aftermath of the Soviet era is the collection’s thematic undercurrent and it is captured with pathos and lyrical detachment. In Fine Art (at the Pushkin Museum), “swastikas on the street” are contrasted with “one of Degas’ dancers” adjusting “the strap across her shoulder blade”.
There’s an attractive understated, sometimes aphoristic, quality to Moore’s poems where the first person is backgrounded to the observational keenness of the speaker, where “familiar bodies fade into each other” “and lovers strip each other to the bone”. In Snow Trucks , “the sound” of snow “makes you feel/ like you are following yourself”. Time passes in a languorous fashion, “fires are burning somewhere in the flat;/ we are waiting for the station to take us in”.
A political undercurrent is always simmering, and when it is aligned with longing, Moore enacts a kind of magic: “remember to melt down your ring for me;/ let all our promises be one last bullet” (Zapad). Paradoxically, it’s not the exoticism of Lost Republics which appeals so much, but its familiarity. An accomplished and intriguing book.
Paul Perry, The Irish Times 28th March 2009
