An Evening Of Poetry With David Moolten

David Moolten will be reading from his new book, Primitive Mood at Head House Books in Philadelphia.

Nov. 5th (Thursday) 7:30 PM Headhouse Books 619 S 2nd St Philadelphia, PA 19147

Bookstore phone: 215-923-9525

"About Primitive Mood, winner of the 2009 T.S. Eliot Prize, Truman State University Press:

"The poems on the page are powerful and substantial, extremely elegant...The poet's view is exact, casting hope on so much immediate darkness of the world...There is a strong preoccupation here on behalf of the damaged, the displaced, the hurt . . . and it works on the reader's psyche, rendering many of these poems quite memorable. Hauntingly beautiful, I would be brave enough to call this collection. Just the right potent mixture of reality and modern day fable . . . quite enchanting, mesmeric . . . I am thrilled that such poetry exists and it is being written by such capable hands."

—Virgil Suárez, Judge, T.S. Eliot Prize, Truman State University Press, 2009

Taking the dark landscape of our human history as background, David Moolten in his powerful and finely wrought collection, explores the primitive urges that set us against each other, and the cultural heritage—fairy tales, oral histories, legends, narratives—that seems a testament to the cruelties we are capable of. If our “primitive mood” in life is grief, it comes from our all too ruthless acquaintance with wreckage and violence, sometimes through large apocalypses, other times through personal devastations. And any salvation for us lies in our notions of tolerance and restraint, and perhaps in our abiding belief in an indefinable spirit that “bears us / Up and onwards in spite of ourselves.” These are unflinching, brooding poems of great scope and understanding.

—Gregory Djanikian, author of So I Will Till the Ground"