Waxing the Dents by Daniel Edward Moore
Brick Road Poetry Press, 2020
“Interrupting the mind can be sweet deliverance,” Moore declares about halfway through his collection, and indeed, the book can be read as a study in self-interruption, though often, it’s not sweet deliverance with which we are confronted so much as various repeated hauntings as the rifts in narration and contemplation reveal ghosts, monsters, kaleidoscopic dream images/ transfigurations, and love sometimes suffused with danger.
No one creates their personal mythology from scratch; Moore’s is derived from the landscapes of the rural South. He introduces us to the torments and wonders of an Appalachian childhood complete with local brutalities and a literally venomous religion (“Baptized in the church of Pygmy rattler fangs / hanging from my foot…”) imposed upon him in the context of the toxic masculinity he grew up in:
…the skin grows numb to the light
and darkness puts on a baseball glove
catching everything his mouth throws at you,
one hard word after another.— “The Architect’s Son”
In a Wombell Rainbow interview, Moore remarked that in his poetry, he’s “obsessed with how people connect and break in relationship, how they are healed and broken at the very same time… Rarely do I write from the outside in; most of my work is born from listening to an internal conversation.” In his childhood terrain (“the hill’s wounded side”) the “hard words” of those remembered exchanges make their way to him through the “blue-collar silence” of a social setting rife with a violence which functions as initiation. Moore presents much of this via the same religious imagery with which he explores the intricacies of romance and gender/sexual identity. Throughout the collection, the spiritual is as inextricable from the erotic as sweetness is from brutality and glory from shame:
…It’s why a candle burns
on the altar of my flesh, swaying back and forth
between the wounds and wonder.— “Confessions of a Pentecostal Buddhist”
Throughout the collection, I gravitated less toward its associational leaping (the internal logic of which I found hermetic) than toward its narration and lyricism. Moore can render a story powerfully, and he possesses a lovely lyric voice, as in this passage, for instance, in which he speaks of his current home on Whidbey Island, Washington, where some of the poems are set:
Why wouldn’t the light be grieving
at the hour when all things fade, you included,on the field’s gold edge, turning black, then silent,
so silent it hurts?This is dusk on the island, when the mind grows still
like a horse asleep where it stands…— “Feeling Tones,” Section 5
In her book Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, Avery F. Gordon states, “Conjuring is a particular form of calling up and calling out the forces that make things what they are in order to fix and transform a troubling situation.” As these poems unfold, Moore’s pacific images of his current setting serve to conjure up contrasting images of childhood, and vice versa, just as erotic displacement and satisfaction conjure each other with frequent tonal shifts. The book, like the house in “Word Forest,” is filled with “dramatic seizures of wind, / temperatures falling, velocity rising.”
Waxing the Dents was a finalist for the Brick Road Poetry Prize. Moore’s chapbook Boys was published by Duck Lake Books in February of 2020. He has completed another collection, Dear Elegy, as well as a chapbook, Glass Animal.
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Claire Bateman is the author of Wonders of the Invisible World, forthcoming from 42 Miles Books, and eight other poetry collections. She has been awarded fellowships from the NEA and the Tennessee Arts Commission, and she has received the New Millennium Writing Award twice as well as two Pushcart Prizes.