Complete Poems
Moore invented a poetry of syllabic form and zoological precision. Her poems about animals (the jerboa, the pangolin, the frigate pelican) are actually about accuracy, courage, and how to look at anything. Her famous opening to "Poetry" ("I, too, dislike it") is the funniest self-subversive move in American poetry. She influenced Elizabeth Bishop most directly, and Bishop's influence is everywhere.
'Complete' is false advertising; Moore gutted her own canon for this volume, slashing 'Poetry' from thirty lines to three and revising classics into lesser versions, with an epigraph noting that omissions are not accidents. The poems themselves are armored: quotation collage, syllabic grids, footnotes, a fastidiousness that handles feeling with tongs. Admiration comes easier than love.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
