Harry Moore
Description
"In his new poetry collection Harry Moore looks back across the decades to his "happy rural childhood" in the American South - under the shadow of Col
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d War fears - and even deeper into time; but '52 Ford pickups and boxy black Model Ts aside, this is no exercise in nostalgia. Rather, it is in every sense a confession, of witness and complicity, yes, but more importantly an act of contrition, seeking absolution and reckoning for the long history of racist violence, repression, and on-going inequities that are the legacy of his region and his people. Echoing the words of Herman Shaw, survivor of the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study, while we cannot amend the past, "it's / never too late to forgive, never too late / to heal, restore trust." Moore wonders at the possibility of such forgiveness - "after / the ships, the auction blocks, the war, / a state constitution bloated and tangled / to block freedom at every turn, lynchings / to breed fear and cowering-when we / the people have done our worst" - but he takes inspiration from Shaw's wish for "us to be one America, / black, red, white together, trusting each other, / caring for each other, never allowing such / a tragedy again." And in doing so the pronoun is his title expresses not only collective guilt, but also an act of hope of collective redemption. At this moment of resurgent white nationalism, when such hope might seem to be receding, Moore's confessions are more necessary than ever"--
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