The Room Within — 2010 ·

Poems

“Imagine a poet who can deal with the experience of Jack Kerouac but with too much intelligence to limit himself to the road. You don’t have to imagine him. He exists in Moore Moran. Moran has many skills, all of them beautifully bright, and on occasion when he looks into the abyss they take him safely over it.”

Turner Cassity

“I tend to like Moran best when he is at his most formal, most concise, most spiritual. But I like everything in this book, his first in a decade, and I am very grateful to Swallow, whose specialty is poets of the American West, for giving us this generous sampling from one of Ivor Winter’s greatest Stanford students.”

Tim Murphy — Able Muse

“Moore Moran writes out of a wide range of experience in both traditional and experimental verse. Reading his work is a joy for the reader seeking a mature and sensitive mind.”

Helen Pinkerton

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The Room Within is a retrospective survey of a poetic career dating back to the late fifties. A student of Yvor Winters at Stanford, Moore Moran has deservedly earned a reputation, along with fellow Winters students Turner Cassity and Edgar Bowers, as a "poet's poet." He stands, though, not as a disciple, but as a poet who has earned his own voice over the decades, a voice at once familiar and haunting, down-to-earth and carefully wrought—a unique sensibility that emerges not full blown, but rather line by careful line.

Moore Moran’s first book, Firebreaks, won the National Poetry Book Award in 1999. His poems have appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, Paris Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Santa Rosa, California.