Old Bourbon, Cormac McCarthy, Muscular, Falconry, Siberia, Wildness – these terms have all been associated with Gary Worth Moody’s poetry collection Hazards of Grace. Certainly the power of these associations is understandable. His lines resound like stallion hooves pounding against a barn door. His voice tells of freedom longed for and the eventual, tenuous release.
I recently met Gary at a social gathering. I remarked to a few that I liked his work. The reply from all was consistent: “Powerful” was the word they used. But what is this power? It is more than his impressive stature, honest eyes and firm handshake. His power is paradoxically realized within the courageous vision to be vulnerable. By definition, paradoxes demand, even as they form, a tertia media, a higher way that is revealed only when facing the end of surface knowledge. The truth forged between two competing vistas.
I admire (and cringe) the displayed tension between father and son that lingers throughout these pages. Moody’s presentation is a rugged path ascending a crest. The climb is not easily accomplished, but it is more than worth the effort. One wonders about the courage to love, to remember, to hope against despair, against the leather leash that limits the flight of even the most powerful raptor. In this work, the poet willingly lets the wild bird fly. He risks losing. He is no longer in control. The majestic flight may not return, and readers of his lines feel his act of release, finally, as an act of love.
Really the book is a novel in verse, retold with haunting jurisdiction. Technically, the format consists of pronounced visual line-spacing (often more than one image fills a line) that commands attention in five chapters. Magnificently, the book is full of color. His long lines reverberate with dust and sage and fog and coal and water and sun. Some examples of his use of color in no particular order:
“wild violet” (56), “eyes not black, only amber” (53), “seared pink” (27), “yellow bus of children” (26), “volcanic pine” (81), “water reflected blue in red stone” (81), “sheathed in pink” (62), “pale turquoise eyes” (34), “blood orange wash of her hair” (51), “sun struck blue” (80), “red mouth of their daughters” (47), “copper skinned morning” (23), “red chili, calabacitas in butter and brown sugar” (22), “white as a scorched bone” (57), “green cuttings on the road” (47), “lavender scent” (51), “black volcanic salt” (50).
My non-sequential presentation of these phrases of color is intentional, for it suggests the aesthetic rendering of the poet’s use. Reading Hazards of Grace, whether forward, backward or randomly, engulfs the reader in an array of irrevocable color. The book is an art gallery as much as a novel in verse. His color usage is primal, stirred deep in the soul of being. His coloring establishes the geography of the book. Yes, his geographic arrangement is vital, but finally the places blur into a pochade of color – South Texas, Siberia, Appalachia and New Mexico – all seem the same despite the poet’s accurate attention to particular details associated with named places. The landscape collapses into the primal struggle to walk upright among the bones, wrestling, like old Jacob, for blessing – to be free in everlasting sky of his hawk, honest like the core below the poet’s feet.
But this father/son theme keeps pricking. This nagging, unspecified, eternal chance to be new – this is where Moody’s lines arrest me. The fists, the shotgun, the dreams. Who cannot feel: “This night it rains my father’s hands” (23)? I sense (and I applaud) the author’s courage. This work is “for the family of the beautiful-eyed father and ghost of my own” (35). Life is a hazardous journey, this much seems profoundly beautiful in Moody’s lines. But what about the “grace” nominated in the title? Ah, there is the awkward hope of a poet! Such titles betray the glory of implication a truth-teller knows. Of course, a truth-teller is first and always a truth-seeker, and Moody’s quest for organic truth is both frightening and exhilarating. The grace, of course (of course!) is realized in the act of questing. It is the gift (or those gifts) that results from a refusal to be static, institutionalized, paralyzed in memory. To borrow from Freya Mathews and David Bidney in The Ecological Self, the poetry of Gary Moody exhibits what the Scholastics called Conatus: “the impulse for self-preservation or self-maintenance, and also for existential increase, or self-realization.” Bidney continues: “The nature of a thing is not shown by its static perfection of form; and it is not defined by reference to some end which it tends to realize. The nature or essence of a thing is rather expressed by its … power to continue in existence.” The grace in this work moves beyond the static forms of poetry lamenting old memory; rather it is a living quest for Conatus, for self-realization, for self-preservation within the ongoing context of a living, yet hazardous planet. This is the grace realized in Gary Moody’s work. Grace is the breath breathed high above the Sangre de Cristo Mountains where, finally, memory floats harmless as a midsummer cloud.
reviewed by Ken Hada, East Central University, Ada, Oklahoma
Gary Worth Moody. Hazards of Grace. Santa Fe: Red Mountain Press, 2012. ISBN 978-0-9799865-7-4.