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Enter: Poems
In Enter, poet Jim Moore navigates the public spaces of his neighborhood—parks, boardwalks, piazzas, even parking garages—and encounters people negotiating mortality in the pandemic age just as he is coming to terms with his own long story. In his signature lucid and wry voice, Moore acknowledges suffering while making room for joy and for moments of peace. These poems offer shelter to readers and, in summoning poets like Rilke and Tsvetaeva, remind us that poetry’s tenderness can be repaid in tenderness. “Please show me how to be you,” he writes in deeply intimate lines revealing a poettapped into the networks of human connection vibrating under the surface of all the places humans gather.
Enter is a collection of thoughtful meditations on hope at a moment when hope seems far-fetched, when humanity is faced with the inevitability of being “grazed upon by earth.” Yet Moore finds the joy, he writes of shyness and the bells of a church resounding, of counting “I find words. I write of love.” Enter is a collection of thoughtful meditations on hope at a moment when hope seems farfetched, when humanity is faced with the inevitability of being ‘grazed upon by earth.” Yet Jim Moore finds the joy, he writes of shyness and the bells of a church resounding, of counting “I find words. I write of love.”
Enter is a collection of thoughtful meditations on hope at a moment when hope seems far-fetched, when humanity is faced with the inevitability of being “grazed upon by earth.” Yet Moore finds the joy, he writes of shyness and the bells of a church resounding, of counting “I find words. I write of love.” Enter is a collection of thoughtful meditations on hope at a moment when hope seems farfetched, when humanity is faced with the inevitability of being ‘grazed upon by earth.” Yet Jim Moore finds the joy, he writes of shyness and the bells of a church resounding, of counting “I find words. I write of love.”
- GenresPoetry
72 pages, Paperback
Published May 6, 2025
2488 people want to read
About the author
Jim Moore
153 books30 followersLibrarian note: There is more than one author with this name.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
April 26, 2025
Thank you NetGalley for an ARC for this book.
Moore's poetic voice is unique and exciting to spend time with. Meaningful reflections weave the day-to-day with the deepest elements of humanity. Nature, love, identity, aging, hurt, and hope are present in the collection.
Moore's poetic voice is unique and exciting to spend time with. Meaningful reflections weave the day-to-day with the deepest elements of humanity. Nature, love, identity, aging, hurt, and hope are present in the collection.
June 3, 2025
Jim Moore’s Enter is an elegy for a life passing us by and all the souls who’ve landed there and at the same time, an invitation for a kind of birth. I am grateful Moore was there with his loving observation to see all this beauty and share it with me.
July 19, 2025
Jim Moore’s Enter is a moving and warmly intimate collection of poems as he wanders through the settings, actions, and memories of life (art galleries, moon sightings, passings strangers, parks, the close of a football game) taking stock of a life lived and looking ahead to its nearing close. By nature of that latter focus, there is a deeply elegiac tone to many of these poems, but not a mournful one. Rather, the collection faces mortality with curiosity, a bit of befuddlement (“I can’t seemed to get it/through my head/that we are born, then die, /and anything in between that isn’t love is ridiculous”) an expectant embrace, a recognition of one’s place in the universe (“Nothing in this new life is asked of me except to remember how small I am.”), an acceptance fortified by a long life spent observing the daily beauty of mundane existence (“It wasn’t castles or a horse in Scotland./It was what I had and it was everything.”)
Time and again the speaker is struck by vivid details of the natural world, whether in the moment or as recollection:
• “Light falling on the last/of the stricken leaves of the copper beech at the end of the block/is something to behold”
• “It matters that you saw/those two small turtles floating on a sunlit log in Colorado.”
• “There is a small grove of ragged pine trees grazing in the sunlight, right now … falling needles, keeping us company on our slow ride down, we who will be grazed upon by earth.”
Other times it is other people who catch the narrator’s attention: a nurse in scrubs walking to work at near-dawn, someone brushing their hair “using a car window as a mirror”; “a boy sitting by the water fountain, his head in his hands”, many times offering an opportunity for a shared empathy or connection. The fountain boy “ playing hide-and-seek with himself, hoping to be found”; the hair-brusher an example of how we all “do like the idea that we might fix ourselves … a fond and useless wish”; the nurse “intent and on her way [to] help as best she can … We all, at least once in our lives, will help as best we can.”
The poems fall softly, gently on the reader; there’s a sense of immersion in the speaker’s world, as well as a sense of reassurance. If there is darkness ahead, it is not a frightening one but the type where, “after so much light darkness, too, is beautiful.” If the title has several meanings or aligns well with a particular image of a sign in a parking garage in one of the poems, it also works as a warm invitation into the poet’s world, even as the second half — “exit” — goes unsaid but remains always present.
I could quote a number of other lines and passages and entire poems that moved me, provoked my own recollections, my own looking ahead, but I wouldn’t want to spoil the pleasure of coming across them in one’s own reading. Suffice to say that it is a collection that rewards on nearly every page, that ages well via multiple readings, and that will remain in the reader’s head for some time afterward. Highly recommended.
Time and again the speaker is struck by vivid details of the natural world, whether in the moment or as recollection:
• “Light falling on the last/of the stricken leaves of the copper beech at the end of the block/is something to behold”
• “It matters that you saw/those two small turtles floating on a sunlit log in Colorado.”
• “There is a small grove of ragged pine trees grazing in the sunlight, right now … falling needles, keeping us company on our slow ride down, we who will be grazed upon by earth.”
Other times it is other people who catch the narrator’s attention: a nurse in scrubs walking to work at near-dawn, someone brushing their hair “using a car window as a mirror”; “a boy sitting by the water fountain, his head in his hands”, many times offering an opportunity for a shared empathy or connection. The fountain boy “ playing hide-and-seek with himself, hoping to be found”; the hair-brusher an example of how we all “do like the idea that we might fix ourselves … a fond and useless wish”; the nurse “intent and on her way [to] help as best she can … We all, at least once in our lives, will help as best we can.”
The poems fall softly, gently on the reader; there’s a sense of immersion in the speaker’s world, as well as a sense of reassurance. If there is darkness ahead, it is not a frightening one but the type where, “after so much light darkness, too, is beautiful.” If the title has several meanings or aligns well with a particular image of a sign in a parking garage in one of the poems, it also works as a warm invitation into the poet’s world, even as the second half — “exit” — goes unsaid but remains always present.
I could quote a number of other lines and passages and entire poems that moved me, provoked my own recollections, my own looking ahead, but I wouldn’t want to spoil the pleasure of coming across them in one’s own reading. Suffice to say that it is a collection that rewards on nearly every page, that ages well via multiple readings, and that will remain in the reader’s head for some time afterward. Highly recommended.
November 12, 2025
“Mother” is a hall of fame poem. There are some other really good ones, and lots of good lines, including one about “rising to the occasion of being born” that sent me straight to journaling. so interesting to see this poet’s (or “the persona” ok) voice on the page as he, at the age of 79, grapples with time passing, love, life, and so on…really the stuff of poetry. this is a pandemic chapbook and actually lends appropriate gravitas to some of the feelings of being in and “coming out if” lockdown. for me it’s still just a little too soon tho.
November 12, 2025
I don't know Jim Moore, but sez here he's written eight books, five with Graywolf, published the first back in '76 (yep, back in that day we called shit The New Body) with Pitt Poetry, and he appeared on a podcast with Kevin Young where they chatted about a Jane Mead poem, so whereas Jane's my old friend (RIP) I took notice. Moore's own he read that day was "Mother." "Mother" does not take long to announce itself, an affect that might well be related to having experience verbally that sets an auditor back on her or his heels, as a counter-puncher likes to have it:
My friend and I had a cat we called Mother.
I took the couch, my friend got the one bedroom
because he often had sex and needed
that private darkness. I had not yet had sex
of my own volition.
I won't go on to spoil it from there but some of us know what we're in for. The moment's troped a moment later: the roommates loved the cat, etc., but the be-roomed mate is off gettin' his thing on when "mother" winds up in the narrator's lap breathing its last: "'Mother's died,'" he phones his roomie, "there was a long silence, then | he whispered quietly, 'Oh, no,' | as if he wanted to keep the sorrow to himself."
"Volitionally" is a thing: you keep it to yourself, whereas the opposite you might well announce; I have my doubts about that phone call the roomies share in the wake of their pet's death, but there's a droll little joke in calling a cat "Mother" that causes me to doubt my doubts of Moore's tone, that is often sharp. With whom do we share our deepest traumas? There's a more precise-than-precise metonymic wit operating in the pet's name. The narrator tells his IRL mother of a trauma has occurred to him but "life went on, as it does, | without much of a pause." What's the point of making an announcement of life-impacting trauma against one's person to one's own mother vivid in the precision of its detail? We've got all sorts of words for sex-coercion: rape, assault, molestation . . . precision, given the audiences, can only confuse the matter. For Louise Glück, it was "Mock Orange." For Moore:
the beautiful gray sky
of a rainy May day, and the lindens
coming into flower. The smell!
You and I both love it (Did you know
all along I was writing this poem to you?)
Often at night we walk to the river
and stare down into the black current
which has reached flood stage
and sweeps everything before it.
Something in the verbal style of Jim Moore's poems must be read from lines like "Mother"'s. Whereas it's a craft, I want a ladle-full. Those moments of unexpected Siren-scouting frequently come up in the secret, "private darkness"- because-substituted-for expected precision or lexical choice in metonymic associational usage. In "The Small One" the figures are: 1. the olive trees [presumably in the Umbrian town of Spoleto, one of the volume's two predominant locales, the other urban Minneapolis] with "someone I love nearby"; 2. a baby reaching out for the narrator in a dream; & 3. the Zelig or, the silly one -- the one in need. In each of the poem's three sections, the suppression of one of these figures releases the force in the others interacting. It's a beautiful poem in a high style, well-worth imitating.
Perhaps it will be worth saying the entire volume isn't pitched at the level of these two examples of mastery. Moore frequently has the poem on his mind, and that high style demands the devices only recognizable in some deshabille as poems. We don't complain about this in Stevens but I'll be curious if it's a late style or something Moore has always had a penchant for. In its plainspoken force I think it would be a book Jane Mead would admire, and no septugenarian need castigate themselves for finding these kinds of resources available through the poem.
My friend and I had a cat we called Mother.
I took the couch, my friend got the one bedroom
because he often had sex and needed
that private darkness. I had not yet had sex
of my own volition.
I won't go on to spoil it from there but some of us know what we're in for. The moment's troped a moment later: the roommates loved the cat, etc., but the be-roomed mate is off gettin' his thing on when "mother" winds up in the narrator's lap breathing its last: "'Mother's died,'" he phones his roomie, "there was a long silence, then | he whispered quietly, 'Oh, no,' | as if he wanted to keep the sorrow to himself."
"Volitionally" is a thing: you keep it to yourself, whereas the opposite you might well announce; I have my doubts about that phone call the roomies share in the wake of their pet's death, but there's a droll little joke in calling a cat "Mother" that causes me to doubt my doubts of Moore's tone, that is often sharp. With whom do we share our deepest traumas? There's a more precise-than-precise metonymic wit operating in the pet's name. The narrator tells his IRL mother of a trauma has occurred to him but "life went on, as it does, | without much of a pause." What's the point of making an announcement of life-impacting trauma against one's person to one's own mother vivid in the precision of its detail? We've got all sorts of words for sex-coercion: rape, assault, molestation . . . precision, given the audiences, can only confuse the matter. For Louise Glück, it was "Mock Orange." For Moore:
the beautiful gray sky
of a rainy May day, and the lindens
coming into flower. The smell!
You and I both love it (Did you know
all along I was writing this poem to you?)
Often at night we walk to the river
and stare down into the black current
which has reached flood stage
and sweeps everything before it.
Something in the verbal style of Jim Moore's poems must be read from lines like "Mother"'s. Whereas it's a craft, I want a ladle-full. Those moments of unexpected Siren-scouting frequently come up in the secret, "private darkness"- because-substituted-for expected precision or lexical choice in metonymic associational usage. In "The Small One" the figures are: 1. the olive trees [presumably in the Umbrian town of Spoleto, one of the volume's two predominant locales, the other urban Minneapolis] with "someone I love nearby"; 2. a baby reaching out for the narrator in a dream; & 3. the Zelig or, the silly one -- the one in need. In each of the poem's three sections, the suppression of one of these figures releases the force in the others interacting. It's a beautiful poem in a high style, well-worth imitating.
Perhaps it will be worth saying the entire volume isn't pitched at the level of these two examples of mastery. Moore frequently has the poem on his mind, and that high style demands the devices only recognizable in some deshabille as poems. We don't complain about this in Stevens but I'll be curious if it's a late style or something Moore has always had a penchant for. In its plainspoken force I think it would be a book Jane Mead would admire, and no septugenarian need castigate themselves for finding these kinds of resources available through the poem.
November 12, 2025
Trite
November 24, 2025
What a beautiful, tender collection of poems from a poet who is aged, and contemplating life/death/beauty…
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews