ALAN JUDE MOORE

Alan Jude Moore was born in Dublin and began publishing poems at turn of the millennium in journals such as The Stinging Fly and The Burning Bush. Moore has a pan-European approach in terms of his poetics and is just as likely to take a cue from Apollinaire, Montale or Lorca, as he is from Yeats or Kavanagh. Where many Irish poets have been focused on rural life, Moore is decidedly urban. As he wrote in a 2001 essay, “History did not begin and end with the bog; the bog is not the landscape of importance in Ireland at the moment. It is not where great sea-changes are taking place, where cultures are being reinvented”.

Concomitantly, in Moore’s first collection, Black State Cars (Salmon Poetry, 2004), his images are those of the contemporary city, of “pigeons drinking / from a pool of steam and oil” at Connolly Station. Irish poetry has sometimes tended to be insular, concerned with Irish history or mythology. History, for Moore, is not about any reconnection with perceived folkways, but rather the disconnection of “the sun bleeding like a bullet hole / through the windows and the bars, / over graveyards and processions”. It is not that Moore is free from the weight of history, but he treats it differently than other contemporary Irish poets. In “Heading into Darkness outside Athlone”, for example, he writes, “History coils around my leg / and begs” and refers scornfully to “externalised historical centres” where “sentiment is wrapped in a paper bag”.