Reviewed by Michael T. Young
Amanda Chimera
by Mary B. Moore
Madville Publishing
Jan 2025, 108 pages, ISBN: 978-1-963695-05-2, us$19.95, paperback
There are some poets whose new work I can’t wait to read. Mary B. Moore is one of those poets. Winner of the 2023 Arthur Smith Poetry Prize, her new collection, Amanda Chimera, is a deep exploration of the dualism of the human psyche that harkens back to the nuance and complexity of Blake’s emanations and spectres. But to start with the aesthetic, what draws me always to Moore’s poetry is the beauty of her poems. She is a poet who is guided by the music of language. And though that may be a truism for nearly every poet, Moore is among those poets whose ear is so exceptional that the pleasure of it is a primary feature.
Reading her poems, similar to reading the poems of someone like Hopkins or Kay Ryan, one is enchanted by the lyricism, the play of sound, the symphony of words and word play. One can hear the need to hit the right notes driving the poet to write such exquisite lines as:
The needles click the brittle
talk of beetles and grasses (“Amanda Penelope,” 36)They’re matte and wooden,
pot-iron black, but not mute:
coiled in a pewter jar,
they click and gossip (“What the Rosary Beads Say,” 45)His slippers slap the asphalt (“Saviors,” 49)
As Joseph Brodsky put it, “to the poet phonetics and semantics are, with few exceptions, identical.” And one can see this in Moore’s poems that are so marvelously, deliciously musical, locating their meanings like an orchestration rather than a thesis, a wonderous symphonic search to understand the dimensions of a dual self. The eponymous figure of the collection, Amanda, had a twin, which her body absorbed in utero. But now, this twin haunts her life as the “jilted ghost/of almost” (“To the Miscarried Child,” 38). Although, it would be erroneous to reduce the presence of this ghost to a singular meaning or quotation. The relationship is more dynamic than that, changing and moving, shifting with context and time. Sometimes it’s not easy to know who is who:
Which is you
when we’re both also me? (“Amanda Chimera,” 2)
At other times, she is more distinct. In fact, she has a name: Gloria, and is the mood or feeling of Amanda’s life:
at ease in liminal
places like the angels in Renaissance
paintings, aloft in corners, mostly eyes and wings.
She can wash you in feeling, which is all
she is now—having disavowed breath—
and hovers at your edges, weightless as vows. (“Gloria, as the Jilted Girl, 53)
This corresponds interestingly to what we learn of Amanda in the poem “Embroidering,” where it says, “She cannot find a mood, a key for being Amanda.” The marvel of this is it more brilliantly corresponds to the Jungian conception of the unconscious as a compensatory response to the conscious mind rather than the simpler Freudian idea of a mere repository of repressions. So as Amanda changes, so does Gloria, and what is said of a downy woodpecker in the poem “Amanda Quite Contrary,” could be said of Amanda/Gloria:
he’s both/and, not
either/or, contraries married
and capped with acclaim (77)
Moore’s poems also engage other aspects of this dynamic physic evolution by refracting our understanding through other people and moments. For instance, the poem “Wound and Ground” confronts the revelation of a lie in her aunt’s history: that her sister was not her sister at all but her mother. The significance of this is that the lie is both “wound and ground” of a life lived. The secret buried becomes the numinous sense of the sacred or, as the poem puts it, “The bastard knowledge is holy.” This buried lie, this wound that slowly bled over a lifetime, mirrors the reality of Gloria within Amanda, how this figure who was never born still exists. It recalls a quote from the poet Czeslaw Milosz, “It is possible there is no other memory than the memory of wounds.” Gloria herself is a kind of wound, the echo of a life that could have been or, as earlier quoted, the “ghost/of almost.”
The phenomenology of Amanda/Gloria that the collection presents is simultaneously a dual and singular self, a dynamic play of self and self-within-the-self evolving through time and circumstance, which also makes Amanda’s very existence into an embodiment of the sublime. The sublime is not simply the dictionary definition we accept of something that inspires awe or a sense of grandeur. It is a subtle concept in the history of philosophy and poetry, a mixed experience of terror and beauty. This mixed quality of the sublime can be traced through such philosophers as Hume and Burke or the Romantic poets. Perhaps Rilke’s famous words on beauty from the first Duino Elegy is the best succinct expression of its core:
Beauty is only
the first touch of terror
we can still bear
and it awes us so much
because it so coolly
disdains to destroy us. (translated David Young, 19)
Moore’s chimera, Amanda/Gloria, is an embodiment of this mix of terror, beauty, and awe. As Amanda says of herself, “I like/a mixed diction.” But more to the point:
In the shower, she hums
Te Deum riffs
and lauds her god who’s
awe, or is it dread? (“Amanda as the Saint of Red,” 32)
Or
The terrors his brush disclosed,
bad gods among the beauties. (“To the Miscarried child,” 39)
This last quote is from a poem based on Van Gogh’s Irises at Arles, and Van Gogh is the epitome of the artistic figure staring into the face of the sublime in all its tension of dread and awe, beauty and terror. But the heart of it, of this sublime psychic dualism is not, finally, something to be resolved or concluded but something to be lived. Like the fundamental questions of life that we keep asking over millennia: why am I here, who am I? We are all dualisms in this way. The very existence of an unconscious is the existence of a second self inside us. So, we find this story of someone with a twin absorbed in utero and echoing through their life, echoes our own, the inner dialogues, the second guess, the wondering about it all. Thus the final poem in the collection, even after invoking Socrates who “riddled and fiddled it,/the many and the one,” still concludes with a question:
Is it all those spaces that
prickle and pierce,
that drive us to join, to be
entered or enter another
doomed cloud of atoms,
charges and urges? (88)
The drive, the draw to join, to be, to be “entered or enter another,” what beckons us to existence. It is not the answering of a problem but the living that is the answer. And these poems celebrate that living and questioning exquisitely. Few recent poets I can think of have so adeptly handled this complex material of physic dualism in as refreshing a way as Moore has in Amanda Chimera. It is a collection of both beauty and insight, of exquisite music and elegant searching into the nuances of the human psyche.
About the reviewer: Michael T. Young’s fourth collection, Mountain Climbing a River, will be published by Broadstone Media in late 2025. His third full-length collection, The Infinite Doctrine of Water, was longlisted for the Julie Suk Award. He received a Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award. He received honorable mention for the New Jersey Poets Prize in 2022. His poetry has been featured on Verse Daily and The Writer’s Almanac. It has also appeared in numerous journals including I-70, The Journal of New Jersey Poets, Talking River Review, and Vox Populi.