Retreat: A Way Forward by Harry Moore

In the last poem of his Retreat: A Way Forward, Moore asks, and what of himself will he leave?  For me, this is a reflective question that flows through the entire book—each poem a quest, a search, a deep looking at both the present moment and a past generously remembered.  The poet’s close bond with nature is also a continuous thread, beautifully woven into his curiosity to discover meaning in every moment.  Led by an unceasing muse, will she whisper things he must write till dawn, Moore keeps the reader intimately involved, as he dives into lakes, cocoons, old journals and dusty briefcases.   This searching is ultimately a means to discover a fluid, renewed faith in life’s journey, which embraces twisted grasses, weeds…and trees he’s yet to name, as well as the divinity within each of us.

–Bonnie Rose Marcus, author of The Luminosity

There is a still, small voice of wisdom, a “sober undercurrent,” within the poems of Harry Moore’s Retreat: A Way Forward.  No longer midway on life’s journey—at an artist residency—he mines a lifetime worth of journals, “slough[ing] off a medley of old/selves” and seeking the clarity of “some lasting form.”  Perhaps, as he suggests, we are all trapped in our own cravings; perhaps words, the seeking after them, never really changes anything within the self or within our environments.  Nevertheless, Moore seeks a legacy to leave behind that will carry us all forward into “a whole new song”—one that is sacred and spacious and lifted up, despite this wilderness we wander beneath a God-haunted “empty sky.”

–Jeff Hardin, author of Small Revolution and Restoring the Narrative