What do you think?
Rate this book
The Freedom of History: Poems
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
March 8, 2026
Far from perfect, The Freedom of History: Poems takes us to the heart of Jim Moore, a not-inconsiderable affair. Perhaps a star in the [goodreads] cosmos the pollution of stars clouds out. Anyway back of what we may barely make out, Moore's Freedom stands in memory: watching from "My Prisons," "the Standard sign through barred windows, | miles down the road, I can still see how red | that sign was in the pale sky at dawn." That red "beautiful," as the incarcerated judges it, how pale it might have seemed to him, "a little nearness of time." The lines catapult those months Jim Moore was jailed for taking his c. 1969 draft card, with its "teacher's" deferment -- the "classy eccentric" MFA-er was professing The American Renaissance to a working class roster of Moline, Illinois college students -- and sending it back to the draft board, to which the draft board lawfully took their share of exception. As the final poem here, "For You," narrates, that two of Moore's students from a semester or so earlier had carried their headful of Whitman to Vietnam, and promptly returned stateside as casualty, left their teacher without place other than prison to stand.
"The Freedom" to stand -- if only to stand looking at a Standard sign -- was no doubt accorded Jim Moore bountifully, and his superciliousness is only too apparent to him in a narrative poem witnessing Croat terror at La Guardia airport in the latter days of 1975, in a bombing that left scores dead or injured. "At the time of the explosion I was waiting for a plane one floor up and a little off to one side of where the bomb went off," Moore remarks in the poem, "Terror's Only Epitaph"'s epigraph. "A little off to one side" makes all the difference, it's almost too glib to observe. However, the adjacency allows Moore to mine some of the irony he's getting from his title, which encompasses poems that witness their speaker's historical adjacency, while finding a meditative mat from which to partake of the events' flow. Many of the poems are ekphrastic, partaking of museum-tourism travel still, in both the mid-to-late Seventies and the early-to-mid Eighties, afforded American privilege. The ekphrasis is careful, incantative, and at times achieves a loose, flowing line. The mix of modes, narrative and ekphrastic, is harder to pull off. It pulls a reader closer to Moore's buddhism, his practice and his (continuing adventures in) penance. These will be the middle sections of the book, to which I'll return.
"The Freedom" to stand -- if only to stand looking at a Standard sign -- was no doubt accorded Jim Moore bountifully, and his superciliousness is only too apparent to him in a narrative poem witnessing Croat terror at La Guardia airport in the latter days of 1975, in a bombing that left scores dead or injured. "At the time of the explosion I was waiting for a plane one floor up and a little off to one side of where the bomb went off," Moore remarks in the poem, "Terror's Only Epitaph"'s epigraph. "A little off to one side" makes all the difference, it's almost too glib to observe. However, the adjacency allows Moore to mine some of the irony he's getting from his title, which encompasses poems that witness their speaker's historical adjacency, while finding a meditative mat from which to partake of the events' flow. Many of the poems are ekphrastic, partaking of museum-tourism travel still, in both the mid-to-late Seventies and the early-to-mid Eighties, afforded American privilege. The ekphrasis is careful, incantative, and at times achieves a loose, flowing line. The mix of modes, narrative and ekphrastic, is harder to pull off. It pulls a reader closer to Moore's buddhism, his practice and his (continuing adventures in) penance. These will be the middle sections of the book, to which I'll return.
Displaying 1 of 1 review