Amazon Website of the Poet David Moolten Website of the poet, David Moolten Category:  Poetry Publisher: Truman State University ISBN-10:  1931112959 Pages: 80 Copyright: September, 2009 ISBN-13: 9781931112956 Prize winning volume of poetry by the American physician poet, David Moolten "The poems on the page are powerful and substantial, extremely elegant...The poet's view is exact, casting hope on so much immediate darkness of the world...There is a strong preoccupation here on behalf of the damaged, the displaced, the hurt . . . and it works on the reader's psyche, rendering many of these poems quite memorable. Hauntingly beautiful, I would be brave enough to call this collection. Just the right potent mixture of reality and modern day fable . . . quite enchanting, mesmeric . . . I am thrilled that such poetry exists and it is being written by such capable hands." —Virgil Suárez, Judge, T.S. Eliot Prize, Truman State University Press, 2009 "Taking the dark landscape of our human history as background, David Moolten in his powerful and finely wrought collection, explores the primitive urges that set us against each other, and the cultural heritage—fairy tales, oral histories, legends, narratives—that seems a testament to the cruelties we are capable of. If our “primitive mood” in life is grief, it comes from our all too ruthless acquaintance with wreckage and violence, sometimes through large apocalypses, other times through personal devastations. And any salvation for us lies in our notions of tolerance and restraint, and perhaps in our abiding belief in an indefinable spirit that “bears us / Up and onwards in spite of ourselves.” These are unflinching, brooding poems of great scope and understanding. " —Gregory Djanikian, author of So I Will Till the Ground

Philadelphia Stories
In his newest book, Primitive Mood, David Moolten picks at humanity’s darkest tendencies and deepest capacities for suffering. Like a patchwork quilt of the twentieth century, the poems in this volume handle violence and loss, questioning and disillusionment, determination and resilience. In quiet, authoritative and incantatory language, Moolten probes the fabric of culture in the West – from the Brothers Grimm to Arshile Gorky – for material that bears his project witness. What emerges is a densely woven and engaging collection of poems, delivered with rhythmic diction, and sometimes reminiscent of spoken word poetry in its rolling momentum and charged endings. With all of the darkness of war, genocide and internment that Moolten lays bare in this volume, there is also a light that enters through the “aperture” of his writing to illuminate the everyday people silhouetted against the dark backdrop of history, reworking their own suffering into beautiful stories. It is this creative power of narrative that stands against the destruction evident in human history in Primitive Mood, and which is also present in Moolten’s powerful and intelligent writing. Moolten’s language is crisp and evocative, and lends itself well to his project of storytelling and remembering.

- Valeria Tsygankova