If No Moon

 

Moira Linehan

paper, 0-8093-2761-9, $14.95t
978-0-8093-2761-4
80 pages, 6 x 9
Copublished with Crab Orchard Review
Crab Orchard Series in Poetry-
Open Competition Award
Jon Tribble, series editor
Poetry

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Living with the ongoing presence of grief

If No Moon by award-winning author Moira Linehan documents the effects of profound loss and the dark withdrawal into grief. Wherever the author turns—the landscape of her backyard in Massachusetts, a Trappist monastery in Kentucky, the museums of Florence, or the cliffs of Inishmor in Ireland—she sees only the geography of emptiness. Crossovers between craft and art, form and voice, knitting and memory, recur throughout the poems. Lying within the tradition of narrative poetry, elegy, and the lyric, the collection reveals the mysterious journey of return. Coming full circle to find again the lyrical and the transcendent within the everyday, beauty eventually wins out. If No Moon, accessible to all who have or will experience loss, is the voice of one who has come to understand that there is no other work but starting over. 

 

Crows

Whoever said Straight as a crow flies
never saw the crows in my back yard

zigzag tree to rock wall, garage roof, shrieking
back to wall, branch, gutter, crosshatching the air

in a fury of streaks. Try reading those lines
for a sense of the world, the heart’s weight,

what keeps you up in the air, keeps you going
back to where you’ve just come from. Force-field

around me, below me, this house my husband
died in and left me years ago now, rooms

I still crisscross, pulled as I am by something
in the earth’s depths, or maybe much closer:

his body buried two streets away, or those desires
that surfaced screeching, flying every which way

the months he was dying. Just when I think they’re gone,
they’re back en masse in swoops, shrill as ever.

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“Wind-whipped on the promontory of loss, these winged poems are heroic answers to the void that Linehan's painstaking work shows us is a door.” —Jack Myers, former poet laureate of Texas and author of Routine Heaven

“What a welcome and brilliant debut is Moira Linehan’s superb If No Moon. This moving and luminous volume contains profound meditations on loss, on the rituals of mourning the beloved, and on the poet’s difficult pilgrimage from “grief’s labyrinth” to an eventual willingness to embrace life again. Linehan’s lyrical and precise poems honestly enact and reveal our paradoxical natures, our mystery enshrouded lives­—our human frailty, and our surprising strengths and resilience.”—Maurya Simon, author of Ghost Orchid

“Moira Linehan’s measure in image and language makes of love and of grief intensities that can be borne, just borne, and catharsis.”—Carol Frost, author of The Queen's Desertion

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Moira Linehan, award-winning poet, poetry teacher, and prolific author, has published numerous poems. She holds both a master of fine arts in writing and a master of arts in teaching English.