Especially
Then, Poems by David Moolten
In
Especially Then, David Moolten
crafts sweetly melancholy stories that touch the world’s evanescences:
“Regret more cumulative than anger, the same ache/Repeated like
a stone in the symmetry of a wall.” Ranging over time, love, memory,
connection with others, Moolten’s second collection is a gift.
Sample Poems by David Moolten
Praise for David Moolten’s Work
“One trusts this writing because, though far from being unmoved
by what it sees, it is dispassionate and steady in its gaze, always
true to the materials it interprets. This is as much so of the poems
in which the speaker is studying himself, his own emotions, as it is
of the poems studying our history…This is a true book by a true
writer.”—David Ferry, from the introduction to Plums
and Ashes
“Moolten’s language is deceptively simple but run through
with a shining filament of metaphor. I don’t mean that the poems
are straitjacketed into conventional extended metaphor, but rather that
the figures created are touched into life as a candle touches dark wicks
into brightness, fading, then flaring anew. There is almost a fugal
quality in the working of metaphor here, the pattern of changing recurrence…these
are poems that ignite and go on burning.”—Betty Adcock,
The Southern Review
David Moolten was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1961. His poems have
been widely published and anthologized, and his first book, Plums
and Ashes, won the Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize in 1993.
A practicing physician, Dr. Moolten lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
with his wife and children.
ISBN: 1932339698, 96 pages, $17.00