Moira

DESCRIPTION: 1995, 88 pages.
Moira has the complexity of both a mystery and a morality tale. It is ripe with poetic stratagems. Norma Cole has invented a liquid space where figures enter passageways (sections) of "discovery rather than defining." She examines appearances as if they were granular. She maintains an immaculate stance (and one of surprise) balancing a prose structure with poetry. And the agility with which she disrupts the book’s linearity. As if a continual ticking were still heard in that interrupted space... "The pages were hidden in my mouth." A "pleated summing up" can only defer to the passageways of an exceptional book.

To recover the telling, the human, we must unwind the tale, unbind the tale, the present seems to say. And to recover meaning, we must resist its simulacra, cajolings and screens. We must allow the voice– the work– its plurality, its silences, its infinite, its pleated body. Such, in part, is the project of recovery and discovery in Norma Cole’s Moira. With striking formal and emotional range, its sequences call toward things and the ideas in motion in them.

§ our city has done that and this

§ irritation has returned

§ not to speak of drawing parallels, are not always

taking the context or implications into hand

§ no longer

dreams blind

§ build these things and paint them

§ brightly

Nothing of the past is in these...pictures

stations of the plague

and on a silver tray you also left your card

lazy and erased

elevated by foldings

in three

genealogy of cities, Carthage

daughter of Tyre

to place up

lacing vocabulary of action

places direction with brackish water

wind called splitter or cleaver

refusing to let the supply ship dock