Poetry Reading.

In 1991 Lenard D. Moore won the Third Black Writers Competition and as part of his prize gave a reading sponsored by the North Carolina Writers' Network at North Carolina Central University, in Durham. Though not yet forty, Moore is a well-practiced poet, having given more than forty readings from San Diego to New York to Germany; he has also published four chapbooks and collections of poetry, most notably Desert Storm: A Brief History (Los Hombres Press). The 30-minute videotape of the competition reading provides a good introduction to Moore's work, for it includes thirteen poems, several of which are strong.

Two of the best poems build on Moore's experience in the service. In "Lejeune Boulevard: Jacksonville, North Carolina," he objectively describes driving past the "freshly dug holes" of the Beirut Memorial Tree project. But as the speaker recalls the U.S. Marines killed in Lebanon, the poem ends with an evocative metaphor, his throat "dry / as any slice of bread." A more personal poem is the hauntingly surreal "After-Images," which presents images of war that are as "clear / in [his] mind" as "strips / of film," but images he wishes he "could shed . . . like snakeskin." Most haunting is the voice of a brother departing for Desert Storm, a soldier whose voice, beyond "the dark veiling pines" that "talk / to one another," enters the speaker's mind, "forever / piercing far / into [his] ears." These adroit enjambments show just how expressive and sure Moore's line arrangements can be.

Two especially emotional works are the formally disparate "Poem for Langston Hughes" and "Diary: Night of the Tornado." In "Langston Hughes," Moore creates two balanced nineteen-line stanzas that rely heavily on rhythmic repetition and parallel structure to convey Hughes's enduring, stirring influence. Moore's act of writing about Hughes enacts the poem's tribute to the poet "whose sentient words . . . / have led brothers and sisters / to cast words upon page after page," creating poems like this one that "treasure their heritage." Equally effective, though less formal, "Diary" represents the nightmarish terror of hearing a tornado approach from "the pitch dark of the night." Here Moore displays a gift for metaphor and assonance: After "the calm stretches like / a cat entering shadows," the tornado's "scream" wakens "the sleepers for warm death," Including - the speaker fears - "us on the bed, undressed, / grasping a gas lamp."

Unfortunately, though Moore reads his poems slowly and clearly enough, his delivery, tone, and expression rarely change. Thus, many poems may be more effective read than heard. For Instance, Moore ends every line with a rising inflection, a habit that particularly undermines the impressive written closure of several poems. This unvarying delivery is most noticeable in the poems about jazz, blues, and soul. "Sunday Evening," for example, attempts to express the excitement of witnessing a Ramsey Lewis performance, but the fusion of Moore's unmodulated pitch and an excessive repetition of words - "move, move"; "pluck, pluck"; "claps, claps"; "rhythm, rhythm" - produces, for me, monotony more than jazz (although, to be fair, I should add that the audience clapped after Moore read this poem).

To be sure, this videotape presents Moore as a serious writer whose poems often carry an impressive music. Only a well-tuned ear could sing phrases such as earth's surface or where fire once flared like a fine ball. To his credit, Moore enunciates these lines carefully, and he also makes some interesting comments about the poems' compositional and biographical contexts. Those not yet acquainted with Moore's work may be wiser to put their $23 toward one or more of his books; but, for those who already own them, this tape makes for a singular supplement.

Reviewed by

Matthew C. Brennan Indiana State University