Book Reviews 129 

The Ramadan Sonnets 

By Daniel Moore. West Bethesda: A Jusoor Book-Kitab and San 
Francisco: City Lights, 125 p p .  

Best book of poems I’ve read in years by a contemporary and have had the 
pleasure of being lifted by, shot into the orbit of harmonious rapture grins and 
the joyousness of countless YES, 0, YES. The collection resonates and puri- 
fies the deep sweet water in the cells where the real self drinks. The resonating 
builds stanza by stanza, poem after poem, informed by an American spiritual 
and mystical lineage from Transcendentalism to the Beats of the Beatitude 
Vision into as-yet-to-be identified and named Third Wave, holding in its 
unnumbered beckoning hands the world‘s mystical poetry body. Moore’s spec- 
tacular contribution to this present building surge arrives before his audience 
with a thorough immersion in Islam’s Sufi way. This is experience inspired into 
song, not a complex geometry of imaginary gymnastics afloat in an alienated 
mental life. 

His outbound living as an example wedded to the deep dive that makes for 
an inner expansion wider than any exterior stepping out can accomplish is, to a 
nonpractitioner, an unfathomable paradox. This inward-most plunge drops the 
body’s limited physical senses and mind and allows for a direct knowing rarely 
found in today’s American poetry. While moving through and using as subject 
temporal moments, actions, and things, the eternal and the divine shine through 
the transitory. At times he evokes this light to such an extent the daily OCCUT- 
rence becomes but a shadow play. 

More striking, all of these poems were written during one month, that of 
Ramadan, while living in Santa Barbara prior to the author’s move to Phila- 
delphia to live in the light of a denser Muslim experience than what was avail- 
able. The poems range from the well-known, long Beat-like free verse line, a 
line that he has raised to a level eclipsing the older Second Wave, to the for- 
mal sonnet with surprising rhymes and meaning behind the meaning so that 
the form, unlike most contemporary attempts, is secondary. While autobio- 
graphical Ramadan experiential poems, these are al-d significantly- 
both outer and inner foods that can nourish one to push forward into a more 
perfect reflection of human potential. Among mystics, the saint is the normal 
human condition; anything less is wanting. 

Important as well, or maybe more important, the poems move the non- 
poetry audience, because they are readily accessible from the details of 
everyday stuff to transcending, straight-foward Sufi narrative-they are not 
occulted by esoteric poetic posturing of the common bob and weave and obscure 
reference or gesture. His inward reaching has created an outward stretch far 
beyond the usual and sad condition of today’s American poetry. 

Karl Kempton 
Visual Poet and Book Reviewer 

Oceano. California