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!

This is a dazzling albeit sometimes entirely opaque collection of poems that imagines the American Civil War as a layer upon other wars, chronicled by and around a Joan of Arc who moves through time and history and historiography. While I admit that some parts came across as word salad, other sections had me delighted by the clever use of language and imagery and references Moore uses. It's a text I'll be returning to in order to tease out additional meanings and choices.