Long Rain

Lenard D. Moore's Long Rain is a book of elemental tanka poems (similar to haiku) in four sections (Earth, Wind, Fire, Water), each of which is introduced by a short prose haibun. Yes, these poems capture a series of detailed moments, primarily set in the American South, but they also employ an unsettled fragmentary language (no full sentences) to express the flow of experience in a way that gives the book a surprising energy and sense of movement. "Lenard Moore is a Japanese poet who lives in North Carolina, or a North Carolina poet who lives in an imaginary medieval Japan. He has been a farmer, an American soldier in Germany, a schoolteacher; his ancestors came from Africa in chains. He seems, to the world's eye, to be as representative a husband, father, and citizen as any sociologist might point to as a statistically ordinary well-behaved American. And the sociologist would be wrong, for Lenard Moore is a poet, and all good poets are extraordinary, and very good ones are unique." -from the introduction by Guy Davenport.