From Publishers Weekly
Poets and critics now consider Moore (1887-1972) a major modern American poet, equal (or almost equal) to T.S. Eliot, and maybe better than (if nothing like) Ezra Pound. Most of her best poems appeared (just as theirs did) during the 1910s, '20s and '30s. Yet Moore left some of those poems (and most of her earliest verse) out when, near the end of her life, she prepared her own Complete Poems; other famous poems entered that volume only in late, much-revised versions. Schulman's long-anticipated volume presents, for the first time, the full span of Moore's work, from her flirtatious, tangy collegiate light verse, through a trove of promising poems from the 1910s, and including masterpieces that for decades were available only in libraries. Moore's careful ethics and elaborately arranged stanzas seem almost more relevant to contemporary poetry than they did to poets of her own generation, though Schulman, a poet herself and the poetry editor of the Nation, perhaps overstates Moore's influence in an awestruck introduction. All Moore's well-known poems are here, of course, including "The Steeple-Jack," "Marriage," and "Poetry" ("I, too, dislike it") in both its longest and its shortest versions. The real selling points, though, are the long out-of-print poems-most of them enlightening, a few ("Melancthon," "Radical," "An Old Tiger," "Dock Rats") as good as anything she chose to keep. As Moore herself explained (in a poem she later suppressed), "Compliments are free/ To all but are not synonymous with admiration": admiration is what this volume will attract.Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
"Her eyes are different from ours, instead of a flashing whole, her mind sees first and they obey its orders in microscopic detail." So wrote Winifred Bryher about her friend Marianne Moore in the 1920s. Anyone reading Grace Schulman's new edition of Moore's poems would do well to keep this comment handy. For the poetry is so full of "eye" that it almost seems to be a visual art. Moore's originality has been examined at length quite cunningly by poet-critics ranging from T.S. Eliot to Robert Pinsky. Still, her poems tend to elude those critics whose eyes and minds cannot keep up with the multiple exposures of Moore's oncoming visual details. To reread her now, 31 years after her death at 85, is to wonder how much further an eye could possibly go. Not much, I'd say. So for now, let our eye look at hers. Looking backward, then, align your mindful eye with the image Moore conjures in "The Sycamore": "Against a gun-metal sky/ I saw an albino giraffe." Consider, in "Sea Unicorns and Land Unicorns," one of those fabled creatures "etched like an equine monster of an old celestial map." Squint at "An Octopus," "its claw cut by the avalanche." Study her pangolin, with his "sting-proof scales; and nest/ of rocks closed with earth from inside, which he can thus darken." Or watch her herd of elephants: "a/ religious procession without any priests,/ the centuries-old carefullest unrehearsed/ play." And do not neglect the snake of which Moore writes, in her poem "Snakes, Mongooses, Snake-Charmers, and the Like": "one is compelled to look at it as at the shadows of the Alps/ imprisoning in their folds like flies in amber the rhythms of the skating-rink." Here one metaphor foments another with an excitingly exact series of persuasive mixed metaphors.Not for nothing did Moore choose to adorn a work with the wistful title "I May, I Might, I Must." For a slow and scrupled writer such as she was, any poem represented a continent of choices. Her fellow poet William Carlos Williams explained the nature of the challenge, and her response: "With Miss Moore a word is a word most when it is separated out by silence, treated with acid to remove the smudges, washed, dried and placed right side up on a clean surface. Now one may say that this is a word. Now it may be used, and how?" Moore was known to confess that she had first hoped to be a visual artist. As a Bryn Mawr College senior, she seriously considered attending the Lyme School of Art in Connecticut following her graduation. Many years later, composing some of her best poems in Brooklyn, she wrote and revised, revised and wrote, while sunning herself on the roof of her apartment building. Light, sight, insight, writing: for her all were essentially conjoined. "Yes, light is speech," wrote Moore in a poem. "Free frank/ impartial sunlight, moonlight,/ starlight, lighthouse light,/ are language." She preferred to perceive and penetrate a surface, yet not relinquish it. Tension then ensued between depth and surface, yielding the insight. (Or as Moore, also a revelatory essayist, succinctly pronounced it: "Form is synonymous with content.") Holding a fine balance between description and analysis, Moore's poems enchant the reader while reflecting her own enchantment with language. As Morton Dauwen Zabel, her editor at Poetry magazine, noticed, her "sincere and ruthless insight" made her able and willing to "combine the functions of critic and poet in one performance." Schulman's edition of Moore's poetry is needed for a fair appreciation of that performance, for the poet's own fastidiousness led to an unusual publication history: She chose to exclude some of her poems from various collections, imposed drastically revised versions of certain poems on certain volumes, and accepted or mandated orderings of poems within their books that at times made it difficult even for seasoned readers to assess her chronological development. Schulman's edition readjusts Moore's body of work respectfully and generously by restoring lost or overlooked poems in logical sequence, and by lifting the veil on their sundry revised versions.How many of Moore's poems do we now have? Her Collected Poems (1981) consists of 130. The Poems of Marianne Moore offers 263, so Schulman introduces readers to more than a hundred poems previously unpublished or uncollected in book form. Moore wrote the bulk of them between the ages of 20 and 26, before she moved to New York City and swiftly became known to an inner circle of poets, editors and poetry critics. Three-fifths of these restored poems have not been previously published anywhere, making this collection a work of excavation and rescue. One fruit of the excavation: A reader is able to realize the remarkable feat of Moore's emergence from authoring epigrammatic verse to, you might say, inventing a poetry of epic wants and tendencies. An epigram compresses adroitly a mass of knowledge, thanks to the writer's unquenchable wit; Moore later wrote on a much larger scale without abandoning the epigrammatic yen for unmatched precision, for what she called "exact perception." In this she reigned peerless, even after achieving ultimately in poetry her more complex goal of building a "chain of interactingly/ linked harmony." Time after time, the early poems gathered by Schulman show a writer pausing before making that leap. (Compare "Things Are What They Seem" with "Piningly," an early rehearsal of her flight to come, or with "Old Tiger," where she fulfills her promise. Also, in the early poems one can find precociously pure statements of poetic or moral belief, as in her lines "One associates the love of beauty/ with a wish to see it exemplified." Although she wrote the sentence well before she had obeyed fully its implied guidance, Moore was ever a writer of exempla, as Schulman demonstrates: Although in her poems Moore sought to think, she did it with and through details that carry a moral significance. To read her very early four-line poem "A Fish" alongside her subsequent 40-line poem "The Fish" is to see this plainly and magnificently. The poems flicker, steadfastly visual, throughout these pages. They are, as she demanded of art in "When I Buy Pictures," "lit with piercing glances into the life of things." Even now, a novel and a memoir by Moore both remain unpublished, and her 10-year labor of translation, the complete Fables of La Fontaine, seems to have gone out of print -- all sad omissions of publishers, or maybe just bad luck. Still, at last we have all of her poems, at least. Reviewed by Molly McQuadeCopyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

From Booklist
The great American modernist Moore (1887-1972) was nothing if not self-critical, and the book she entitled The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore (1967) excluded more than half the poems she had published. Schulman, who, when she was 14, became acquainted with Moore and wrote her doctoral thesis on Moore's work, with Moore's cooperation, now restores Moore's exclusions, not just in this book's main text but in editorial notes, among which variants of several poems, some of them quite different from their canonical siblings, appear. (Notice, however, Schulman's reluctance to claim completeness for her edition; apparently there are files to be opened yet.) The resultant volume is important in two ways. For Moore's enthusiasts, it is so much more Moore. For readers who have never warmed to the highly allusive, botanically and zoologically detailed lyrics for which she is admired, the great number of earlier, more accessible poems that opens this book constitutes a welcome entree into her work, thanks to Schulman's wise decision to present the poems in chronology. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Her poetry shines with accuracy and wit; her portraits of animals and her passionate conversations reveal the truth of such moral principles as courage, freedom, love, the will to see clearly, the power to feel deeply. When Viking published Moore's Complete Poems in 1967, John Ashbery wrote in The New York Times Book Review, "I am tempted simply to call her our greatest modern poet. This despite the obvious grandeur of her competitors, including Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams ... Her work will, I think, continue to be read as poetry when much of the major poetry of our time has become part of the history of literature." Now, a generation after her death, John Ashbery's words hold fast: Moore's poems have prevailed. Her place on Parnassus, alongside her contemporaries Eliot, Pound, Stevens, and Williams, remains secure, her eminence a certainty. Yet no other major American poet is cherished more and known less than Moore is. Most of her readers are familiar with only part of what she wrote, for Moore herself excluded nearly half of her work when she prepared her so-called Complete Poems. That book (the only volume of Moore's poetry that has been available for the last two decades) omits such major poems as "Old Tiger," "Roses Only," "Radical," and "Half Deity" -- not to mention the early poems, some of them never collected, others never before published. Indeed, her earlier Collected Poems, which won formidable prizes, lacked many beauties as well. This long-needed volume, lovingly edited by Grace Schulman, will bring back those poems at last. Organized chronologically to allow readers to follow Moore's development, this book includes more than one hundred previously uncollected and unpublished versions, along with useful notes, attributions, and revealing variants. For the many readers who clamor for Moore's poetry, this wonderful new collection will be indispensable; for new poetry-lovers, The Poems of Marianne Moore will be the perfect introducti

FROM THE CRITICS

The New York Times

The Poems of Marianne Moore, edited by her friend Grace Schulman, gathers some 100 previously uncollected, mostly early, poems and clarifies her poetic development. Moore died in New York City in 1972, at the age of 84, and until now the standard text has been the Complete Poems of 1967. The new edition reveals plainly how, as her poetry steadily evolved, what was foursquare became lopsided, discrepant, asymmetric. What was solid became fluid; what was fixed, untethered. Titles to poems lost their isolation (she converted them into first lines by bleeding them straight into the text) and the text itself dissolved into supplementary notes (some of her poems make little sense without them). Stanzas grew more rococo while, increasingly, the sentences inlaid into them originated and halted in unexpected places. — Brad Leithauser

The Washington Post

… Schulman introduces readers to more than a hundred poems previously unpublished or uncollected in book form. Moore wrote the bulk of them between the ages of 20 and 26, before she moved to New York City and swiftly became known to an inner circle of poets, editors and poetry critics. Three-fifths of these restored poems have not been previously published anywhere, making this collection a work of excavation and rescue. — Molly McQuade

Publishers Weekly

Poets and critics now consider Moore (1887-1972) a major modern American poet, equal (or almost equal) to T.S. Eliot, and maybe better than (if nothing like) Ezra Pound. Most of her best poems appeared (just as theirs did) during the 1910s, '20s and '30s. Yet Moore left some of those poems (and most of her earliest verse) out when, near the end of her life, she prepared her own Complete Poems; other famous poems entered that volume only in late, much-revised versions. Schulman's long-anticipated volume presents, for the first time, the full span of Moore's work, from her flirtatious, tangy collegiate light verse, through a trove of promising poems from the 1910s, and including masterpieces that for decades were available only in libraries. Moore's careful ethics and elaborately arranged stanzas seem almost more relevant to contemporary poetry than they did to poets of her own generation, though Schulman, a poet herself and the poetry editor of the Nation, perhaps overstates Moore's influence in an awestruck introduction. All Moore's well-known poems are here, of course, including "The Steeple-Jack," "Marriage," and "Poetry" ("I, too, dislike it") in both its longest and its shortest versions. The real selling points, though, are the long out-of-print poems-most of them enlightening, a few ("Melancthon," "Radical," "An Old Tiger," "Dock Rats") as good as anything she chose to keep. As Moore herself explained (in a poem she later suppressed), "Compliments are free/ To all but are not synonymous with admiration": admiration is what this volume will attract. (Nov.) Forecast: This volume will supplant Moore's 1967 collection for course assignments, making for steady sales over the long run. Look for profiles of the poet or of the editor (who knew Moore personally) and joint reviews with the University of California's more scholarly selection of earlier work, Becoming Marianne Moore, or with Schulman's own Days of Wonder: Selected Poems (both from late 2002). Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

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