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Poetry readers  will connect with ‘Bloom’ 

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By Tom Stafford, Staff Writer 10:38 PM Sunday, June 13, 2010

You wake this morning and again it is there

that gnawing spirit

like the mourning dove atop your roof

cooing ultimate questions.

— Julie L. Moore

Some would call Julie L. Moore a Christian poet. It’s more accurate to describe her as a poet who is Christian.

It’s Moore’s faith in the art of poetry to find revelation and meaning in everyday life that gives her the power to touch the spirits of readers of books other than the Good One.

One reason is how rooted she is to being an honest witness to life’s stubborn difficulties and transcendent joys.

“Trite and easy answers just don’t exist, ” she said recently from her office in the Cedarville University’s Writing Center, where she is director. She has recently released a book of poetry, “Slipping Out of Bloom.”

No such answers were available to Moore during the months long period in which she was misdiagnosed and mistreated for a rare illness. She speaks to that time in her “Mako Sika,” set in the unforgiving badlands of South Dakota.

On vacation with her family, she tries to admire a grasshopper, and perhaps herself, “for its ability to survive such hostile terrain.” She instead ends up feeling lost “in the 101-degree heat of disbelief” inflicted by her unending pain.

Some poems in the present book will offer special pleasure for Christian readers. In “Proximity,” a drive through the mountains becomes a vehicle for musing on where an unmentioned God watches from — a distant mountain or one “so close my hand/could touch its fleshy/sun-pierced side.”

Moore breathes life into the Biblical of Elisha, putting the reader in the corpse of the dead man revived when his body slides into Elisha’s bones: “once again you heard your heartbeat suffocating silence, you found breath, coughing dust from your chest.”

The notion of a heartbeat “suffocating silence” bears testament to Moore’s poetic skills.

Moore’s poems more often speak to a non-theological sort of faith.

Showing us a typical Ohio scene in which starlings repeatedly swirl into the air as cars pass, then return to their meal of roadkill, she writes, “I am tempted to believe we’ve all been caught on some senseless loop of film playing over and over again.”

“Slipping out of Bloom” is just the ticket for locals who have not taken in a poetry for some time.

The 60 poems divided into five sections and written since 2002 often start with phrases and images that are familiar to those who live in fertile Ohio farmland.

In “Reflection,” Moore, who is 45, shows a black calf with an orange ear tag and whose chewing is “like footsteps crunching mulch” come nose-to-nose with black Labrador puppy at a farm fence.

“I could hear them asking the same curious question,” she intones, “who are you?”

The poem “Say it” describes a magical day on which she feels “purple pulsing within each tulip heart,” hears the “sound of cello humming from each oak leaf,” catches the “scent of God wafting from each swallow’s blue-tinged wings” and imagines “alfalfa sweet and green lingering upon tongues in horses’ dreams.”

As if coiled for a leap of faith, she writes: “Say it, oh do say it, and today I will believe.”

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