The Garden in Winter and Other Poems

There’s hardly a poem here from which some new perception or thought doesn’t emerge. The infl uences are interesting and eclectic: Latin and Greek lyrics, Chinese poems, certain American poets—Zukofsky, Oppen, Creeley—known for their brevity, intensity, attention to craft. Moore’s poems are highly wrought; he is a perfectionist, not a cold one, but one working closely and accurately with human emotions, an eye that has trained itself to see into things and bring back new discoveries. Often his poems are meditations, penetrating through the subject to the life behind it, bringing the moment out from the fixed and eternal.

Prentiss Moore’s poems are dimensionally different from many poems one reads nowadays: they bring together life, art, past, and present, in the quiet and persuasive voice of a poet who feels reverence for what he touches and wishes to express what he feels personally of value, without distortion. These are truly lyrics of the intelligent imagination.