Dissolution of Ghosts, Poems by Berwyn Moore

The ghosts that haunt the elegant poems of Berwyn Moore are the ghosts of loss, of memory, and of the ties that bind. Dissolution of Ghosts enacts its title through the very act of lyric art that predominates in these poems.

Sample Poems by Berwyn Moore

“Witty, gravely serious, skillfully phrased, and charged with remarkable images and dream-like narratives, Berwyn Moore’s poems take us on strange and surprising journeys. The mall, the zoo, Buggs Island Lake are simple starting points for extraordinary leaps of imagination. ‘The Decisive Moment’ tells us how a photograph of a woman falling from a building allows Moore to ‘love her before she hits the ground.’ If we are all falling, and we are, Moore’s poems love us before we hit the ground. This is a triumphant collection.”—Kelly Cherry

“In this collection of startlingly original poems, Berwyn Moore confronts with courage and sensitivity the tremors and trials of a life and decides to embrace them, singing all the while. These are poems that recreate the days and nights in which we live, so that we can better know ourselves. Afterwards, as she describes us, readers and poet: ‘suddenly we’re all laughing—the old, the lost, the new, the cured.’”—David Citino

“In this first book, Berwyn Moore gives us poems of remarkable calm and clarity, brave poems that enter the cloaked underworld of death, betrayal, and separation. As perhaps Persephone discovered, the root of terror is within. But once the darkness is entered and seen through, there is (the poems tell us) anchor, rest, trust, nurture, and a return to honest touch, honest telling. At the core of these dark, dream-like poems is the will to heal.”—Margaret Gibson

“Berwyn Moore’s Dissolution of Ghosts shows why readers of poetry look forward to inaugural collections. There is often in them the splash of the world entered at its coldest, most unforgettable point, the intersection of character and tale which under the impress of discipline engenders what seems a new light on the weight of the ordinary, of experience. All this and more lies at the heart of this first book, the story of a woman going ahead, walking on, resolute and strong.”—Dave Smith

Berwyn Moore was born in Mussoorie, India, and grew up in Colorado, Michigan and Virginia. Her poetry has been published in The Southern Review, Shenandoah, the Journal of the American Medical Association, Kansas Quarterly and other journals. She has won poetry awards from the Chester H. Jones Foundation and Negative Capability press and a teaching award from the National Foundation for the Advancement of the Arts. Her poem “Glass" was nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Before studying English at the University of North Carolina and Bowling Green State University, where she won the Devine Fellowship Award, she worked as a photographer, a hospital pharmacy IV technician, and a respiratory therapist at a children’s hospital. She is an Associate Professor of English at Gannon University in Erie, Pennsylvania, where she lives with her husband, Robert Brooker. She has two children, Aaron and Emma, and two stepchildren, Rachel and Ian.

ISBN 1932339752, 96 pages

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