Book Review: The Reckoning of Jeanne d'Antietam

 

The Reckoning of Jeanne d'Antietam

Poems

by Matthew Moore

 University of Nevada Press 

Pub Date 07 Feb 2023 

 History  |  Poetry 

University of Nevada Press and Netgalley have provided me with a copy of The Reckoning of Jeanne d'Antitetam for review:

Poetry is one of the most difficult genres for me to review, and The Reckoning of Jeanne d'Antitetam is no exception.

This collection of poems circles the U.S. Civil War and the failed revolution of Reconstruction, and Matthew Moore penetrates the histories and beliefs of the era through architectures of sound, as well as ancillary histories and histories stacked upon histories—densely and visibly scrawled—as in Anselm Kiefer's sculptures of lead books, dripping with illegible songs and melting and melting in their forms. His poems include the figure of Joan of Arc (Jeanne d'Arc) and her voices; the explosion of the U.S. prison system and racial legal fictions amid a groundswell of mass terror during the aftermath of the American Civil War; the politically poisoned poetic lineage moving from Modernism to New Criticism and dead ends in Southern Agrarianism; and the destructive colonial histories of sugar and cotton.

In The Reckoning of Jeanne d'Antietam, language, as hard rhyme and difficult music, evanescence and violence are embedded in the spell of language, the testament. Names and events are invoked at the place where they meet in history. In Moore's poems, he stands against sentiment and pity as well as against consolation for the unconsolable. 

I give The Reckoning of Jeanne d'Antietam five out of five stars! 

Happy Reading!