Jim Moore’s Enter is a moving and warmly intimate collection of poems as he wanders through the settings, actions, and memories of life (art galleries, moon sightings, passings strangers, parks, the close of a football game) taking stock of a life lived and looking ahead to its nearing close. By nature of that latter focus, there is a deeply elegiac tone to many of these poems, but not a mournful one. Rather, the collection faces mortality with curiosity, a bit of befuddlement (“I can’t seemed to get it/through my head/that we are born, then die, /and anything in between that isn’t love is ridiculous”) an expectant embrace, a recognition of one’s place in the universe (“Nothing in this new life is asked of me except to remember how small I am.”), an acceptance fortified by a long life spent observing the daily beauty of mundane existence (“It wasn’t castles or a horse in Scotland./It was what I had and it was everything.”)

Time and again the speaker is struck by vivid details of the natural world, whether in the moment or as recollection:
• “Light falling on the last/of the stricken leaves of the copper beech at the end of the block/is something to behold”

• “It matters that you saw/those two small turtles floating on a sunlit log in Colorado.”

• “There is a small grove of ragged pine trees grazing in the sunlight, right now … falling needles, keeping us company on our slow ride down, we who will be grazed upon by earth.”

Other times it is other people who catch the narrator’s attention: a nurse in scrubs walking to work at near-dawn, someone brushing their hair “using a car window as a mirror”; “a boy sitting by the water fountain, his head in his hands”, many times offering an opportunity for a shared empathy or connection. The fountain boy “ playing hide-and-seek with himself, hoping to be found”; the hair-brusher an example of how we all “do like the idea that we might fix ourselves … a fond and useless wish”; the nurse “intent and on her way [to] help as best she can … We all, at least once in our lives, will help as best we can.”

The poems fall softly, gently on the reader; there’s a sense of immersion in the speaker’s world, as well as a sense of reassurance. If there is darkness ahead, it is not a frightening one but the type where, “after so much light darkness, too, is beautiful.” If the title has several meanings or aligns well with a particular image of a sign in a parking garage in one of the poems, it also works as a warm invitation into the poet’s world, even as the second half — “exit” — goes unsaid but remains always present.

I could quote a number of other lines and passages and entire poems that moved me, provoked my own recollections, my own looking ahead, but I wouldn’t want to spoil the pleasure of coming across them in one’s own reading. Suffice to say that it is a collection that rewards on nearly every page, that ages well via multiple readings, and that will remain in the reader’s head for some time afterward. Highly recommended.

I loved the poems in the Enter collection. The poems were easy to understand yet had deep and insightful themes.

Moore's poetic voice is unique and exciting to spend time with. Meaningful reflections weave the day-to-day with the deepest elements of humanity. Nature, love, identity, aging, hurt, and hope are present in the collection.

I love when there is poetry about things that might feel so small to us in passing that can be so beautiful if we look at it under a microscope. Beautiful writing. I loved this collection.