Review of Lost Republics, Billy Ramsell in the Stinging Fly


           This superb second collection finds Moore’s distinctive voice, established in 2004’s Black State Cars, resonating with a new clarity and confidence. Influenced by the neo-modernist tendency but not necessarily of it, Moore avoids the languid, lyrical tonalities striven for and sometimes reached by the majority of his contemporaries. Yet his work could by no means be described as prosaic. His is a robust, sinewy music that once adjusted to has a strangely entrancing charm. Take the following extract from 'Sukharevskaya':

 

            In the bosom of the Empire, learn to clap your hands

like the beauty queens with sunken chests

from a town outside Chernobyl,

who stare at the moon, waiting to be drawn

like the tides along a pavement.

 

 Many of the most powerful things here are oddly cinematic in nature. 'Alphaville' pans from the backrooms of Moscow billiard bars “out across the ring road past the metro line”, to Olympic Gardens that are filled with the human and non-human detritus. A similar urban panorama is to be found in 'National Holiday', which provides an exhilarating sense of the poet’s disembodied eye sweeping the city, peering into the lives of what seem to be randomly selected Muscovites. The beautiful poem 'Snow Trucks' generates a more serene cinematic effect, as it lovingly depicts a cityscape “heavy with powder”.

Moore’s Moscow is a city of paradox. It is both a town on the make with what might be described as Nevadan cynicism, and a hidebound technocratic bureaucracy. It is suffused by both the grasping capitalism referenced in 'Manezh' with its “new Moscow rising” and the listless Chekhovian decay so movingly detailed in 'Iodine'. It is a city that sprouts banks and casinos in an orgy of restless development even as its past layers rise up from under the paving stones. Moore portrays it as a place whose eager stride towards a sleek, gleaming future is forever retarded by the burden of the troubled history depicted in 'The Palace'.

 Violence, in fact, is one of the collection’s most prominent leitmotifs. 'Émigré' , for instance, is an unusually successful meditation on the Middle East, a topic that has wrestled many a well-meaning poem to its doom. Russia’s bloody past haunts poems such as 'New Soviet Sky' and the obligatory series on Mandelstam, who perhaps has finally overtaken Celan in the race toward poetic sainthood. The country’s turbulent present is referenced in 'Main Street Bombs'. This intense awareness of violence looms over the book’s first half like a tower block, lending it a brooding apocalyptic atmosphere. 'Zapad' sums it up with its desire to “let all our promises be one last bullet”.

 Yet there is also a gentle, more conventionally romantic side to Moore’s writing. This is evident in the collection’s second half which leaves behind Moscow for a jaunt through continental Europe, taking us all the way from Dubrovnik to Dublin. 'April' artfully captures a moment of exquisite nostalgia, while 'Balcony' and 'The Student' possess a haiku-like fragility. In 'The Marriage' the poet describes how his lover “tore promises from my lips / like you were unravelling ribbons”. These tender, dislocated pieces perfectly counterpoint the book’s weight and its darkness. Like much of Lost Republics they are poems that demand to be lived with.

  

Billy Ramsell, The Stinging Fly, Issue 12 / volume two, Spring 2009.




                                                

 




 
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