From Mark Shores, “Book Review,” The Appalachian Connection (March-April, 2009), 7.

….These are poems stark in their truth-telling, like the quick tearing away of a bandage. There is beauty, though, too in Moore’s confident use of language, and the evocation of Appalachian Kentucky. Judging by the mood of the Traveller’s Rest poems, Moore’s life in rural Kentucky was both idyllic and hellish. The poems in the first section evoke the manual labor of life in the hills (“Burning the Tobacco Beds”) and the continuation of family ties (“Picnic at the Family Cemetery,” “Ruling the Roost”). Hell appears in the form a tense relationship with his father (“Father in the Dark”)….The poems about death--both of family and friends--are done especially well, such as “The Hard Bright Image of Your Passing” about the passing of his mother.

This is the kind of poetry that makes me, an indifferent poetry consumer, want to read this literary form more often. Moore’s poems let us into his world of family difficulties (but also strong family bonds), his battle with cancer, and his close relationships with friends.

Rene Thompson, To be published, Journal of Kentucky Studies

Frank Moore’s work hits on so many levels. His style is like a cloud of acid, ethereal, palpable but with a bite. Moore is generations deep in Appalachia, his connection with those mountain ties as clear as creek water and the dysfunctions rampant in the generations as thick and dark as the walls of coal.

Frank was born in 1936 and you experience both the love of the land and desperation for escape. The dichotomy between the tug of home and the release of a personal expression away from those who only saw you through the glass of everyday living. 'Poem For Grandmother' was a perfect example of the love and trust of presenting your creative works to a guardian who should empower you, crushed by thoughtless denial. It was beautiful and painful at the same time.

Moore’s humor shines in works like ‘The Best Man’. The imagery of a bride with a wardrobe malfunction is one that any woman that’s ever been a bridesmaid can appreciate. And ‘Haircut’ pure understanding of panic attacks and home done haircuts brought back memories of parental misadventures with scissors.

‘Night Singer’ is the journey of an Appalachian through life from childhood, through adolescence and into adulthood. The last poem written weeks before Moore’s death from cancer. Just as in life the images are sweet, angry, graceful and ugly. No matter what the tone, the work is visceral and honest.

This work, in short, is a gift.

Greater Cincinnati GLBT News Magazine (November, 2008).

Frank Moore lived in Cincinnati back in the 1950s and 60s, graduating from the University of Cincinnati with a BA and an MA in English. It wasn’t until he was in his 40s, living and teaching in Philadelphia, that he came out and began to write. His initial poems, about his childhood in the tiny town of Traveller’s Rest in Owsley Country, Kentucky, are compassionate, often funny, portraits, of an eccentric if not dysfunctional family--aunts, a troubled father, a schoolteacher mother--and his life as an only child. He describes himself as an adult in “Self Portrait”:

Alone,
I am my own
father, mother,
sibling, child & lover:
the family quarrels.

Later poems explore relationships, the death of friends from AIDS, and his love for high and popular culture (D. H. Lawrence, Marilyn Monroe). His final poem, written shortly before his death from cancer in Santa Fe in 2005, describes stopping to sniff the lilacs on his way into the clinic, and remembering crouching by the flowers near the kitchen door of his childhood home.

The Cincinnati Enquirer, reviewing Night Singer, called the poems “spare, eloquent and evocative.” The poet Timothy Liu said the poems “document the journey of a life lived….a spiritual journey, uncovering the layers and secret histories of the past in order to move forward into the unknown, singing all along the way.”

Chris Myers for Per Contra: An International Journal of the Arts, Literature and Ideas (Winter, 2008).
www.percontra.net

These Men of Constant Sorrow

Kentucky might be the only state in the Union where it is always autumn. Why Kentucky poets are seen as regionalists, I will never know. The people of the backcountry have staying power. Some say that their language, captured in songs hundreds of years old, is among the oldest expressions of English in the Americas. Into this tall grass, we lay the poems of Frank Moore.

Frank D. Moore was born in Traveller’s Rest, Kentucky, hardly more than a post office address, in 1936 and died in Santa Fe, New Mexico in 2005. This haunting collection, drawn from a chapbook and unpublished verse, was shepherded to print by his friend, Carol Rainey, with the help of several of Mr. Moore’s colleagues. Traveller’s Rest lives today in the spelling of the 1700s. It is located in Owsley County. As Joyce Wilson remembers in This Was Yesterday: A Romantic History of Owsley County, “Men, women, boys and girls—each possessing the hardy individualism and sterling qualities necessary to a pioneer spirit—crossed the rugged Appalachian mountains to fight disease, misfortune, and wild animals. When they reached the hunting ground favored by the Indians—a land of legend—they liked it.” This is all relevant because this is a place where old history never vacates its seat on the front porch.

These poems are gathered in this volume under the title of that bend in a two-lane highway of the poet’s youth and also under those of the wider world’s cities where he later lived. Some of the poems are delivered from these locations; others are floated memories of home. These are hard poems. They were born in a time when men thinned out the cats in the barn with a pitchfork because there’s only so much to go around. There is spareness in these words, human ways perhaps being most clearly seen in their starkest moments.

[...]

I don’t think Kentucky has any ex-patriates, only people who don’t live there anymore. If this is where your bones were made—and broken, you can no more leave than you can forget the smell of hundred-year-old water soaked into the wooden clapboards of the scarcely painted houses at the end of a hollow, at the end of the world. Frank Moore stands in the tall grass with fellow Kentuckians Wendell Berry and Jesse Stewart, surveying, observing, and witnessing with a particular type of stillness that is neither calmness nor stoicism. It is a unique bluegrass stance of acceptance, endurance, and fated existence. These are men who are caught on the mountaintop in a lightning storm with full awareness of the possible consequences. There is no foolishness here or roaring back at the storm. It is simply how it is.