Prognosis: Poems

by Jim Moore

Overview

Jim Moore’s poems “are chips of reality, obsidian flakes of the heart and mind” (Jane Hirshfield)


In his eighth collection, the celebrated poet Jim Moore looks into unrelenting darkness where moments of tenderness and awe illuminate, at times suddenly like lightning in the night, at others, more quietly, as the steady glow of streetlights in a snowstorm. These are poems of both patience and urgency, of necessary attendance and helpless exuberance in the breathing world—something rare in contemporary poetry. Written in Minneapolis amid the COVID-19 pandemic’s masked and distanced loneliness, after the police murder of George Floyd, as an empire comes to an end, Prognosis turns toward the living moment as a surprising source of abundance. Here we find instances of essential human connection animated by a saving grace that pulls us back from depression and despair. Contemplating with playful wisdom what it is to brave the later years of one’s life, Moore revels in the possibilities of joy and mourns the limits of our capacity to greet the unknown with resolve and wonder. The prognosis Moore foresees demands continued stillness, continued movement: “Also known as going home,” he writes. “Also known as getting over yourself.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781644450703
Publisher:	Graywolf Press
Publication date:	11/02/2021
Pages:	88
Sales rank:	418,045
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Jim Moore is the author of seven books of poetry, including Underground: New and Selected Poems. His poetry has appeared in The Nation, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Spoleto, Italy.

Table of Contents

Look Again 3

And 7

Whatever Else 8

Also Known As 9

Last Day at Seventy-Five 10

Cheese, Almonds, Eggs 11

Instead 12

Be Them Now 13

Ode to My Kind 15

Things That Keep Me from Forgetting Who I Am: 17

And 21

It Was Given to Me 22

Grace 24

The Pandemic Halo 25

Transfiguration 26

Cannot Sleep 27

Things That Keep Me from Forgetting Who I Am: 29

And 33

Not to Know How to Live 34

That man running 35

My Bracelet 36

Today's Meditation 37

In the Poems I Love 38

Driving the River Road 40

Pandemic Psalm 41

Things That Keep Me from Forgetting Who I Am: 42

And 45

I call it joy 46

The Problem 47

Maybe This Happens Almost Every Day of My Life 48

Admit It 49

Spoleto 50

Greed 51

Things That Keep Me from Forgetting Who I Am: 53

And 57

The Work of Being 58

Fear and Love 59

It 60

A Moment 61

By the Light of Two Underlying Conditions 62

It Is Almost Time 63

At the Last Funeral on Earth 64

Paradise 66

A Young Man, a Stranger, Smiled at Me 67

Things That Keep Me from Forgetting Who I Am: 68

And 71

Poem That Leaves Behind the Ocean 72

Even in These Times 73

The ecstasy now 74

Useless Shovel 76

Milk and Beans 77

Metropolitan Diary 78

The Situation 79

Home 80

Things That Keep Me from Forgetting Who I Am: 81

And 85

Little Sainthood 86

Now and Then 88

I'd Like to Say This as Clearly as Possible 89

Minneapolis 90

Prognosis 92

I Will Still be Here 93

Things That Keep Me from Forgetting Who I Am: 94

Where It Takes Me 97

Editorial Reviews

These are poems of arresting lyric reportage; whimsical, tragic, a touch fantastical.”—Daisy Fried, The New York Times Book Review

“[In Prognosis,] Moore isn't telling readers to look away from contemporary realities, but rather to invest care and compassion in the present moment and the people within arm's reach. . . . In Moore's work, readers will discover that clarity and mystery are not mutually exclusive as they encounter luminous images packed with the complexity of life deeply lived.”—Elizabeth Hoover, Star Tribune

“There is a stunning clarity to Jim Moore’s latest poems. . . . Poised at the threshold of mortality, ‘unencumbered / by thoughts of what might have been,’ these poems hover between transient beauty and transfigured time; they embrace and let go of ‘what was never ours to keep.’”—Arthur Sze

From the Publisher