“One trusts this writing because, though far from being unmoved by what it sees, it is dispassionate and steady in its gaze, always true to the materials it interprets. This is as much so of the poems in which the speaker is studying himself, his own emotions, as it is of the poems studying our history…This is a true book by a true writer.”
—David Ferry
“Moolten’s language is deceptively simple but run through with a shining filament of metaphor. I don’t mean that the poems are straitjacketed into conventional extended metaphor, but rather that the figures created are touched into life as a candle touches dark wicks into brightness, fading, then flaring anew. There is almost a fugal quality in the working of metaphor here, the pattern of changing recurrence…these are poems that ignite and go on burning.”
Dear readers, this is my third book of poems, and inside are a special collection of what have turned out to be not only MY personal favorites, but also the favorites of many of YOU. Some of these have never been available in print before...
“The woman or man who is a poet, or fiction writer, or playwright, or all of these, is engaged constantly in a jazz ballet of vocabularies, passions, genders, histories, perspectives, death, love, and life. The music of revelation announces itself to
