Poetry

The Freedom of History

Poems
By
Jim Moore
Winner of the Minnesota Book Award
Select Format

The Freedom of History is an exploration of histories, personal and public, from a writer whose “poems are an artful amalgam of humor and fierce attention” (New York Times).

Jim Moore says of this collection of poems: “It is the rub of history—personal and public, against the feeling of freedom and uniqueness that we experience as individuals—that inspires me to write… . I am interested in the times when personal and political history liberate, and the times when they oppress. But I am also drawn to the times when history, for brief intense periods, seems to disappear altogether, and we inhabit a more meditative and solitary world which gives us a very different perspective on our lives and on that world.”

ISBN
9780915943326
Publish Date
Pages
104
Dimensions
6 × 9 × 0.31 in
Weight
6.5 oz
Cover Art

Praise and Prizes

  • “This is more than a collection of poems; it is a pilgrimage, an affirmation… . Art, religion, love, recent history, terror, a whole range of trancelike connections with experience—Jim Moore embraces them all. He gives them close, sustained—transforming—attention. All parts of life take on magical intensity, and as the voice says in the last poem, ‘I wanted it to go along forever.’”

    William Stafford

  • “Jim Moore is a public poet in touch with what is universal and true… . The product of his efforts needs to be in every American library.”

    Choice

  • “Jim Moore writes of history, of love, of pain, of the intimate revelations of a consciousness alive to itself.”

    C. K. Williams

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