Sheepish Beauty, Civilian Love

Anne Burke is the editor of the Prairie Journal Press.

These poems are synapses, a channel from the brain to the heart, “as
if once / the circuit has opened, it keeps on opening”
(“Articulation”). Mouré displays an astounding development since I
reviewed her Wanted: Alive. There is the typographical game-playing,
like “hart” for heart, for example, and allusions to Frank Auerbach,
Lorca, Theoret, Simone Weil, Israel Rosenfield, and others woven into
the uneven and brilliant patterns Mouré continues to create.

Clearly the word is under erasure in the text; Mouré is fond of
rewriting poems using the same motifs and new orders of the words. She
gives free reign, in self-reflective poems, to critical commentary of
her own work, mocking establishment critics and reviewers. It is as if
the writer as lesbian feminist and political activist is under siege,
and hence the urgency of civilian love in a landscape of social chaos
and corruption. There is much love and openness, an intimacy and
inwardness for the reader who wishes Mouré felt safer (“Considering
how dangerous everything is.”—Gertrude Stein) and did not have
“[t]o live with fearful[ness] in the name of love,” as in “Unicorn
Ear (scanner).” But then it is this very tension and private anguish
from which the poet draws strength, according to her dedication to the
collection: “All these things and people give me confidence to go
on.”

I would like to see an extended study of this muse of the body (which
cannot be undertaken here)—some analysis of these poems that takes
into account the poet’s preoccupation with, and uncovering of, all the
body’s parts, the movement and sensations beyond reason that
constitute feeling.