FORTHCOMING: Robert Moore's fourth book of poetry, "The Golden Book of Bovinities" to be published by Vehicule Press/Signal Editions,illustrated by Montreal artist Chris Lloyd, and edited by Carmine Starnino, will be released this Fall, 2012.
If cows could talk, what would they say? The Golden Book of Bovinities represents the collective wisdom of centuries of bovine self-awareness. On its surface, Robert Moore’s fourth collection is a running ledger of aphorisms, maxims and injunctions that lay bare the mystery behind those docile cud-chewers. Deeper down, however, the book is an indictment against the inhuman cruelty we inflict on each other as well as on the non-human world. A tour de force allegory about our post-9/11 world, The Golden Book of Bovinites contains some of the freshest, funniest, most startling poetry you will ever read.
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Past News:
Robert Moore read and conducted poetry workshops at the Frye Festival in Moncton, New Brunswick on April 19th - 25th, 2010.
www.frye.ca
Robert Moore launched his third book of poetry, Figuring Ground (Wolsak & Wynn), on Wednesday, April 8th at 7 pm at Inprint bookstore in Saint John, New Brunswick. (Over 100 people were in attendance!). Additional launches and readings followed, with Moore in Montreal on April 23rd at the Drawn & Quarterly Bookstore, in Toronto at the Art Bar Reading Series on April 28th and in Hamilton on April 29th at the Pearl Company.
Click here to read the first review of Figuring Ground, published Saturday, April 4th, 2009:
http://telegraphjournal.canadaeast.com/salon/article/623977weeblylink_new_window. Click here for a subsequent review in Canadian Literature (Issue #209. Summer 2011): http://canlit.ca/reviews/equine_bovine_divine
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Moore_(poet)
If film noir could be written in verse, the poet to do it would be Robert Moore. In Figuring Ground, this accomplished poet considers his family, his life and the inner musings of cows, in poetry that’s dark, elegant and disconcerting. Drawing on his experience as an actor and playwright, Moore has created a collection that is richly atmospheric and filled with cinematic details; where his mother's girlhood friends are "an unlikely a pair of cupcakes as you've ever met" and where "The camera's flash supplies its bleach of instant absolute." History and time weave this section together as Moore examines his father's youth and death, searching for him among the shards of images that memory leaves us.
After a series of poems filled with shadows of the past and beautiful angle-shots, Moore breaks from the storyline to bring readers more of his “ Golden Book of Bovinities.” These brilliantly black, short verses capture a philosophy of cows that is completely original. Filled with a puckishly dry humour that stops just shy of being morbid, the “ Golden Book of Bovinities ” will forever change readers’ thoughts about how happy cows look in a field.
Reviewing Moore’s first collection of poems, So Rarely in Our Skins, George Elliot Clarke praised the book’s “funky intellectuality” – an “erudition ... that seems unforced and unrehearsed.” Clarke urged readers to “get a hold of this book...all that he says bears hearing.” Reviewing his second book, Museum Absconditum (2006), Books in Canada praised Moore’s “skill with words – not just his large vocabulary but his knowledge of how to use it – [which] hammers the perfect shape on the right emotional anvil.…This is intense, beautiful writing.”
Carmine Starnino is a Canadian poet, essayist, educator, and editor. He was born in Montreal, Quebec, into an Italian heritage. His first poetry collection The New World (1997) was nominated for the 1997 A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry and the 1997 Gerald Lampert Award. His second collection Credo (2000) won the 2001 Canadian Authors Associate Prize for Poetry and the 2001 David McKeen Award for Poetry. He has also written A Lover’s Quarrel (2004), a book of essays on Canadian poetry, and With English Subtitles (2004) a third collection of poems. Starnino is an admirer of David Solway and Irving Layton, both fellow Montrealers. He is an editor of Signal Editions, and formerly an associate editor of Maisonneuve.
