Complete Poems
Moore invented a poetry of syllabic form and zoological precision. Her poems about animals (the jerboa, the pangolin, the frigate pelican) are actually about accuracy, courage, and how to look at anything. Her famous opening to "Poetry" ("I, too, dislike it") is the funniest self-subversive move in American poetry. She influenced Elizabeth Bishop most directly, and Bishop's influence is everywhere.
The density asks real patience of a reader, and even devoted readers admit the poems don't always stick, pages of notes taken and, years later, the poems themselves gone from memory. More than one reader stares down an unresolved page asking, “This doesn't mean anything... Does it?” while another puts the same confusion more bluntly: “What does this mean? Does this mean something?” Her editorial choices didn't help matters either; one critic calls the slashing of her own poem Poetry down to three lines “one of the most egregious examples ever of terrible revision.” The baseball and horse-racing poems, including Tom Fool at Jamaica, are named as the spots where her style stiffens into moralizing, and the volume's La Fontaine translations are flagged as the weak link of the whole collection.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
