Review of One Small Corner (by Roger Moore)

review written by John Sutherland

One Small Corner: A Kingsbrae Chronicle is a wonderful little volume of poetical works, inspired and provoked by Roger’s residency for a month at the First International Artists Residency at Kingsbrae in St. Andrews, New Brunswick. His time there was clearly productive, with two to three evocative poems constructed each day. His fellow artists, a sculptor, painter, musician (who spoke no English), and another artist (encaustic: one who works in beeswax and paint) must have had a memorable month together.

This set of poems, paints word pictures for the mind to luxuriate in. They also torment delightfully. There are so many delicious phrases and ideas that stood out to me; a distillation of subconscious wisdom, that I had to re-read them several times to be sure I was understanding them and deriving the fullest meaning from them. He spoke in one poem of an umbrella. Just an umbrella, but my mind, by then, was ready for fantasy, and I flew off into imagining the stretched fabric of the umbrella as being the taught, bat-like membrane on a Pterodactyl’s wing, with the metal supports being the long bony supports of the evolved fingers.

Then there was that haunting consideration of the potentially endless vocabulary of words (English and foreign, of course) contained within the combinations and permutations (my words and thoughts) of a simple computer keyboard, and (my thoughts again): needing only enough monkeys sitting there for long enough to produce the works of Shakespeare. There are hundreds of other provocative phrases and stanzas in there. It is a real treasure.

This set of poems is a fitting addition to Roger’s many other books of poetry and prose, and I highly recommend it.

Note:  I suppose I should also disclose that Roger and I have been friends for several years, but that, in no way, influenced the language of this review.