SOURCE: "Memory and Desire: The Poems of Erin Mouré," in Essays on Canadian Writing, No. 30, Winter, 1984, pp. 339-43.

In the following essay, O'Brien discusses Wanted Alive, contending that it is Mouré's attempt at understanding and exploring the human heart.

Throughout her poems Erin Mouré mixes memory and desire—a tenacious memory which sometimes rearranges the present, and a desire to see into the ephemeral future. She has spoken of the past as constantly metamorphosing, and of the future as nothing more than the "present falling forward." In her most recent collection of poems, Wanted Alive, she speaks of the crumbling boundaries which arbitrarily divide simultaneous time. In "Apocalypse, For Spencer," the last poem in the volume, she speaks of past, present, and future in the same breath:

        There is no memory but
        what has fled,
                      scaling the fences.
        The angels of the apocalypse are housewives
        after all...