When an ordinary observation of life teeters into the mundane, we find ourselves in a parking garage. Enter and exit signs, sometimes an attendant, more often a machine. Families pay their tolls, then forever leave the garage. The overwrought metaphor concerns a familiar knowledge that often feels unknowable. Yes, we are visiting, and one day we will have visited—we are here in the garage until, inevitably, we must leave—or as Jim Moore writes early in his new book Enter:
The true silence begins,
the one with two neon signs
at the entrance to the parking garage.
One says ENTER and one EXIT.
“More than enough of us have died,”
Tsvetaeva wrote during her plague year.
“Too long we’ve been howling like orphans.”
Here begins the recurring obstruction of and devotion to “silence,” a fascination of this book: the silence of the before- and afterlives, the cloistered silence of the COVID-19 pandemic, the silence that follows a poem once its final syllables have been performed. Filling the artifice of silence is a nostalgic attachment to memories of silence; filling the artifice of form is memory. The leap from neon sign to Marina Tsvetaeva characterizes the sensibility of Enter: having committed one’s life to poetry, how can one anticipate (in other words: enter) the “true silence” of death (in other words: exit)?
Enter is Moore’s ninth volume of poems, following his 2021 collection Prognosis; Graywolf Press has published Moore’s work since 2005. This poetry is not the ordinary epiphanies of Richard Wilbur, nor is it the baroque homeliness of A.R. Ammons; I’m thinking of poets similarly provoked by the sublimity of the everyday, poets for whom form determines and reveals the conditions for such discovery. When this discovery is situated idiomatically—that is, rather than embedded as a type of lyrical intuition—a poem often reads like an attempt to convince itself of something. “How strange that the subject of life is death,” Moore reflects in “Nothing More,” and the essential strangeness is as familiar as a part of speech. “Everyone / everywhere is just holding on” concludes the first poem in the book, “Prelude,” and the generalization establishes a particular temperament for the book—not one of epiphany but one of begrudging admission.
I feel this way reading Enter in part because the tensile line is often motivated by semantic sense-making rather than the sounds of language; form becomes incidental to conceit. Slackening, the problem determines its solution, because “It helps to be near time, but not right in the middle. / Helps to have the two dead parents to remind him // the floor drops out…” Perhaps all of this is helpful, though I am not certain it matters whether we believe in what’s duly and generatively helpful: the poem is trying to figure that out for itself, just as it “Helps to remember pain // has a beginning, middle, and end. / When the back hurts more than the groin…” Because of this pattern, convinced or in the act of convincing, moments of extraordinary lyricism stand out. Listen to these lines from “At the Poetry Reading Last Night”:
I am, on my good nights, like a pine tree
underneath a moon breaking through clouds:
I shine thanks to a light not my own.
I have made up too much about myself
that is not of that light. That quiet poise.
With roughly five beats per line, the rhythmic movement of these sentences complement the self-possessed act of “shining”; we feel these quiet reflections as collusions between reader and poem, necessary and moving. Yet this pitch cannot be sustained, as the poem soon turns again to sentimentalizing metaphor: “I am like a battlefield / after the war is over.” If what follows “like” invokes as utterly serious a question as war—truly, what in our world is like the aftermath of war?—then the inevitable failure of metaphor must be alternatively generative within the poem. As before, one might dismiss this moment as Romantic overreach, or one might hear this as a tonal effect, or some combination of both: the grasping for familiar conditions, the simultaneous disavowal of that familiarity.
This occasion for familiarity is a particular yet insignificant moment late in life when one realizes the world has transformed, no longer coheres in a way that once seemed enduring. In a park, “kids swing and old men sit.” This is how Moore begins the poem “The Happiness on the Other Side of Happiness,” and as the syntax initiates, the difference in action seems both meaningful and arbitrary. Observing the ritual behavior of these kids, their flirtations and anxieties, the “old men” in the park make a lesson of the generational “division of tasks”: just as the children “laugh, and one says / ‘Fuck that,’” the old man says to himself, “You do not, anymore, / get the joke.” Is it important to forever be in on the joke, or is it a quotidian dividing line, something to acknowledge before turning one’s attention elsewhere? People enter the parking garage until they must exit, it’s what happens, and these poems embed the significance of that cycle through its obvious mundanity:
It was good being born, but this thing
about coming to the end is yet
another kind of happiness:
you will sit here long after they leave
until the day finally begins to close down
because after so much light,
darkness, too, is beautiful.
The charm of these lines is the understated bravado in describing one’s birth as “good,” one’s death as “another kind of happiness.” The beauty of darkness, though, is not something to be animated or discovered within the poem: we are asked to understand this experience as fact, a rhetorical mandate. What is not enacted here becomes a prosaic bookmark, a placeholder for another kind of experience. “Sometimes the world won’t let itself / be sung. Can’t become a poem,” Moore writes, yet in spite of his attachment to silence and solitude, the poet must try.
One poem in Enter stands out among the rest. Early in the volume, “Mother” begins with two friends adopting a cat they name Mother, then the poem quickly shifts: “I had not yet had sex / of my own volition. No one knew / I had been raped.” What follows is the memory of telling his “actual mother / about the rape” several years after it happened—her anger and silence, an aftermath in which “life went on, as it does.” The lingering pulse of violence organizes these lines—“The beautiful gray sky / of a rainy May day, and the lindens / coming into flower”—through the sonic texture of observation, as the new familiarities soon become ordinary. The cat dies, and this figure “was not healed” by sharing this violence with his mother. If the possibility for healing anticipates a future, then the conditions for the present have, in the meantime, transformed:
That smell!
You and I both love it. (Did you know
all along I was writing this poem to you?)
Often at night we walk to the river
and stare down into the black current
which has reached flood stage
and sweeps everything before it.
Suddenly, “you” freezes in a flux of idiosyncrasy and generalization: the embodied particular and the niche of readers, convalescing in a mirror of “I” himself. Enjambment here works against the disruption of syntax: a line ends (“I was not healed”) and a small tension recurs before a new clause or phrase begins the next (“by telling her”). “Did you know / all along,” and the poem makes us feel as if there is only one answer to this question: well, now that you mention it, of course I knew. Because there is no spectacle, no totalizing image, the fast and slow transformations that occur after violence are profound in their mundanity. Suffering is not understated but formalized in the body.
“‘More than enough of us have died,’” Moore quotes Tsvetaeva. Moore’s poem, “When We Were Eternal,” annotates its source with a possessive—“Tsvetaeva wrote during her plague year”—before completing the quote: “‘Too long we’ve been howling like orphans.’” In 1920, during the years of the Moscow famine and Russian Revolution, Tsvetaeva’s daughter Irina died of malnutrition in a state orphanage. The provocative “plague” echoing something of our moment, “When We Were Eternal” angles the figurative dimension of death to suggest a more prosaic culmination of life. Death is so plain and extraordinary that “a man too old to be carrying a skateboard” appears out of a Wim Wenders film: “Maybe that man was an angel / whose wing had fallen off.” Maybe the skateboard is ironic attachment; maybe the skateboard is not a mode of transportation. “Something inside us remembers / what it is like to be eternal,” goes the poem in its final stanza, and as before, the significance of these lines is not the veneer of wisdom: if one chooses to hear them as a kind of discovery, the formal tendrils begin to loosen. Below the aphoristic gesture, one finds the need to formulate an aphorism in the first place: it’s not a process of unveiling but an attempt to situate significance in what otherwise feels completely ordinary, if not disenchanting. As later, in “A Clear View,” equivocation characterizes the attitude of language towards itself: “Probably / I have gone on too long, not just / in this poem, but in life.” Probably, maybe, probably not, maybe not.
Christian Wessels
Christian Wessels is a poet, essayist, and critic. He is the author of Who Follow the Gleam (University of Massachusetts Press, April 2026), winner of the 2025 Juniper Prize in Poetry. He is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Poetry at the University of Rochester, from which he received his PhD in English. He splits his time between New York and the Black Forest, Germany, and is a Contributing Writer at Cleveland Review of Books.