Miss Moore's poems deal in many separate acts of attention, all close-up; optical puns, seen by snapshot, in a poetic normally governed by the eye, sometimes by the ears and fingers, ultimately by the moral sense. It is the poetic of the solitary observer, for whose situation the meaning of a word like "moral" needs redefining: her special move in the situation where [she is] … confronted by a world that does not speak and seems to want describing. Man confronted by brute nature: that is her situation…. Its etiology needs some looking into. (p. 92)
Her poems are not for the voice; she sensed this in reading them badly. In response to a question, she once said that she wrote them for people to look at. Moreover, one cannot imagine them handwritten…. Miss Moore's cats, her fish, her pangolins and ostriches exist on the page in tension between the mechanisms of print and the presence of a person behind those mechanisms. Handwriting flows with the voice, and here the voice is as synthetic as the cat, not something an elocutionist can modulate. The words on these pages are little regular blocks, set apart by spaces, and referrable less to the voice than to the click of the keys and the ratcheting of the carriage.
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