Invisible Strings

"I remember my mother toward the end." With simple ease, Moore (Lightning at Dinner) brings the reader into the past, where one "fold[s] the tablecloth after dinner/ so carefully,/ as if it were the flag/ of a country that no longer existed/ but once had ruled the world." In short, haikulike poems and sequences of short poems, he offers lyrical meditations on love, loss, and the unrelenting passage of time. "Everyone is always younger than me// and more beautiful. Actually,/ this arrangement works." This collection reads like a notebook or a book of days, recording flashes and sparks, epiphanies, stumbles, and triumphs. Despite the intrusions of war, death, and other distractions that come "at the end of an empire," Moore seems to have found peace and contentment, finally, whether in his native St. Paul or in exotic Spoleto: "On the other side of the mountain/ where I cannot see/ I'm sure another old man must sit/ just as I do now/ like this on a couch in his bathrobe/ lonely and happy."