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"Lost Republics" by Alan Jude Moore
Salmon Poetry €12.00

Alan Jude Moore’s second collection is split unequally into two sections.The first consists of poems dealing with his time in Russia and with a variety of aspects of life in capitalist Russia. He deals with feelings and ideas around estrangement, outsider-ness and belonging in the poems in that section.The second shorter section has poems set in Ireland, and Dublin particularly, followed by others, which range across Europe ending up, via Frankfurt and Antwerp, in Dubrovnik.

The structure of the book is interesting and one gets the feeling, reinforced by the cover design, that part of Moore has developed a certain sense of empathy with the people and culture of Russia through his time there, so much so that the movement across the second section feels like a movement home.The cover of the book has the author’s name and the title shadowed in Cyrillic script and one feels that this is not accident or gimmick, but that part of Moore’s identity demands that shadow sense of Russian-ness. Perhaps this is why the poems in the second section, even the Irish ones, have more of the sense of travelogue than the Russian based poems do. By that I mean that the Russian poems are more about the poet’s internal state of being in Russia. They are not really concerned with describing what the poet sees as a tourist might, but what he feels about what he has observed and experienced. Paradoxically, some of the Dublin based poems have that concern for description of what is seen that one would expect of the outsider.

The sunlight belongs to children
Dancing through cracks in the curtains
Hiding in gables and alcoves over Trinity
And all the tiny passers-by

Construction cranes draped in Christmas decorations
              beg your attention 
                                                                            ‘Network’

Whereas in the poems in section one, the description lacks that need to make place explicit, and could really be set anywhere. They are sensitive to the predicament of post- communist Russia and are infused with loneliness, a downbeat sensibility and an almost elegiac quality.The poems are much more about the internal experience of being in the place:

Two years of service still to come.
Down on the border where the girls are crying.

The street is paved with petrol and tears
listing through the cracks of an old museum.
People wait on the steps for a faded pair of eyes,
A smile or expression to say goodbye to.
                                       ‘Fine Art (at the Pushkin Museum)’

The poems in this book are well observed and well worked sets of images which are coupled to a keen ear for the music of language. The line is controlled very well indeed and Moore has the ability to handle the long line and the more staccato rhythm well in terms of their musical unities and as with sensitivity as to how they operate as units of sense. He mixes and matches these adeptly as he deems necessary in many of the poems.

The dust of conversations
the history of affairs
dragged through the snow on the sole of a jackboot.
You left it there; the heart wandered to a different shore.
                                                                     ‘Zaped (West)’

Many of the poems in section one are dated at the bottom (one is actually dated in Russian) and one wonders what importance that has for the reader. I felt the dates distracted me, and I could not find any real significance to them, and although they may serve as aides memoir for the author, they could, and should, have been removed. This is more an editorial issue than a quality one. I would also be remiss if I did not point out what appears to be a misspelling of Agnus Dei in ‘Route’ where it is rendered as Agnes(sic) Dei.

"Lost Republics" will cement Moore’s reputation as one of the better recently emerging Irish poets, one whose voice is distinctive, contemplative and able to draw on and create from the tradition of Mandlestam and Akhmatova, whose stylistic echoes can be seen in many of the poems, as well as the tradition of Austin Clarke and Derek Mahon whose influence I also detect.