From this complaint or confession, he builds the rest of his (beautiful) book, assuming a modestly well-read audience familiar with Beowulf, Hemingway, Dickinson, the Brontë sisters, Kafka, Shakespeare, Wittgenstein (“a maladjusted ectomorph with sensible hair”) and others. Like most successful pomo texts, you don’t have to have read its cultural building blocks to enjoy the poetry—Moore knits his verse into “rigging as perverse as multiplex” (9). His sequence is at turns poignant and hilarious, and humour especially becomes a working part of his rigging.
For instance, Moore outdoes and undoes his academic readership when he speaks on their behalf: “the glass eyes of our T of E [Theory of Everything] look right through you. Its gaze is pitiless.” The caricature of this cruel-eyed us carries over from poem 4 to poem 5: “David Foster Wallace revised / his views on irony. News that he’d adjusted course / tore through the fleet” (13). Aside from such on-point parody, Moore is wickedly funny in other ways. He switches register to snickering effect, as in in poem 34: “Orgy well underway. Too many to take in. What / a marvellous turnout” (42). He does bawdy jokes with a light touch, as in poem 30, where he alludes to “the intestinal intrigue subtending the concept ‘centaur’” (38). His frequent death jokes are quite to this reviewer’s taste, as they are more morbid than macabre: “two firm thumbs to the eyeballs to download the Big Bang Trailer,” he suggests, elsewhere noting that: “At their executions, ironists never refuse / the last cigarette several have used the occasion / to take up chain smoking” (13).
Moore also makes a joke of bad poetry, laughing at the comically futile beauty he originally set up at the book’s outset. His beautiful language, metaphors and images—lines like “the moon waits, tonsured by infinity” (40) and phrases like “husbanding the ammo” (pp. 23)—set the standard by which his jokey bad ideas fall short: poem 27 is structured around a repetition of “Love is a sucking chest wound,” a bad metaphor from which the poet does not allow the poem to recover; and the serially invoked “meat curtains” of poem 37 amount to another joke at the poem’s expense (and, yikes). As in these examples, the source of humour is often juxtaposition.