With a lineage like Honor Moore's -- her grandmother was the painter Margarett Sargent, and her mother was the poet Jenny McKean Moore -- it seems inevitable that she would become an artist herself.
In Honor Moore's case, she became not only a writer who would chronicle her grandmother's life as an artist, but also a poet heavily influenced by visual works of art, as evidenced in her collection of poems, Darling.
Many of Moore's poems feature descriptions and interpretations of paintings, or are simply inspired by a painting's subject matter. In "She Remembers," Moore presents the voice of the subject of Edgar Degas' painting The Bath:
... My face,
praise God, is barely visible in the sedge
of paint. But I was not ashamed, even when
I lay on the floor and he touched me
with his foot. It was as if we were animals.
Look at the bath. What fills it isn't water
but a wild smudged black, as in the countryside
when night rises, beginning at the ground.
Even when she isn't writing about a work of art, Moore exhibits an artists eye in her treatment of her subjects. In "Bucharest, 1989" she exploits colors and their many inherent implications, beginning with an epigraph telling how difficult it was for artists to acquire the color white in that city:
August and nature past peak. I had fled grief and a city
where the dark of black had been my modifier:
red turned devilish, green somber, yellow the ocher of walls
these years of bad coal. I wanted white---
to see what stands around me, to lighten blue
to a sky I can wake up to, of baptism dress,
bridal gown, candles Christmas---
I could not find it in any shop
Honor Moore is a talented poet from a lineage of artists and has definitely elicited much praise for her astute eye and enticing imagery.
