Best Selling Books by Harry Moore

The boys, well built and handsome, bronzed from exposure to the weather and wearing the uniform of the Continental army, were making their way along Wall street in the City of New York one pleasant September afternoon. Dick Slater was the captain and Bob Estabrook the first lieutenant of the Liberty Boys, a band of one hundred sterling young patriots engaged in the war for American independence, and at that time quartered in New York, on the Commons at the upper end of town. As they were walking along Wall street, Dick, who was very observant, noticed a man on the opposite side of the street, who seemed to be watching them closely as if with an idea of learning what they knew, and following them wherever they went. At this time the city was threatened by the British, who held Long Island and had ships at Staten Island just across from Manhattan ready to proceed up the rivers at any time. The presence of British spies in the city was suspected, and Dick, who was an expert spy himself, had his suspicions concerning the man opposite as soon as he saw the fellow.

"In his new poetry collection Harry Moore looks back across the decades to his "happy rural childhood" in the American South - under the shadow of Cold War fears - and even deeper into time; but ''52 Ford pickups and boxy black Model Ts aside, this is no exercise in nostalgia. Rather, it is in every sense a confession, of witness and complicity, yes, but more importantly an act of contrition, seeking absolution and reckoning for the long history of racist violence, repression, and on-going inequities that are the legacy of his region and his people. Echoing the words of Herman Shaw, survivor of the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study, while we cannot amend the past, "it''s / never too late to forgive, never too late / to heal, restore trust." Moore wonders at the possibility of such forgiveness - "after / the ships, the auction blocks, the war, / a state constitution bloated and tangled / to block freedom at every turn, lynchings / to breed fear and cowering-when we / the people have done our worst" - but he takes inspiration from Shaw''s wish for "us to be one America, / black, red, white together, trusting each other, / caring for each other, never allowing such / a tragedy again." And in doing so the pronoun is his title expresses not only collective guilt, but also an act of hope of collective redemption. At this moment of resurgent white nationalism, when such hope might seem to be receding, Moore''s confessions are more necessary than ever"--