Museum Absconditum

By: Robert Moore

September 2006
96 pages | ISBN 1-894987-13-6
$17.00

Time, memory, love and death weave through this intricate and mesmerizing collection of poetry. In this book, Robert Moore has created a museum of stories, people and ideas - some real, some imagined - that captivate the reader. From Joan of Arc, to Rapunzel, to his Father, Moore draws ideas and images out of the darkness making them new and strange, and uses them to create a rich, shadowy tapestry of verse.

Rapunzel

An archetype is a hollow thing.
Marina Warner

Home was thick with towers, driven like stakes
into the valley floor. Girls behind each slit of casement.
Queer as larvae. So pale they all but glowed.

Some tethered to looms, some to spinning wheels. Still
others tending vats of moon. The best among us
transubstantial as ghosts, patient before
great plates of mirror.

Secretly we sat for each other, swam in muzzy circles
at the far ends of our telescopes,
mouthing our names,
tapping the bone between our breasts.

Names you had to touch your heart to hear.

Reviews

• Poet has an unusual sense of humour (Michael O. Nowlan, The Daily Gleaner, 2/3/2007)
• Here, There, and Nowhere (Andre Furlani, Canadian Literature)
• I may become a poetry convert yet (Angie Barrington, Memorial University's The Gazette)

Other Titles by Robert Moore

• Figuring Ground (2009)