Summer

I grip the scythe’s smooth horns and cut
The legs from under the long grass.
Cuckoospit nests collapse as I advance like Death.
A frog leaps clear of my destructive arc.
As I sharpen the blade
I slide my thumb along its edge.
A scarlet drop swells in the hinge of skin.
An earthworm twists beneath the vermicelli roots.

The sun illumines gauzy clouds.
The light toys with my fork as I shovel
Fried eggs and toast into my mouth.
I try to reconstruct my movements for last night.
I must have drunk at least ten pints.
Seagulls bicker. Motorbike snarl.
Will someone shut that door?

Pink sweetpea spires in Avenue Flanders.
Foxgloves like stilled sleigh-bells.
The privet leaves shimmy
Like Donna Summer singing I Feel Love.

A perfect day: blue sky, milk haze;
Sunglasses and ultraviolet rays.
The lavender luxuriates:
The grass stems wave their plaits.
A bee struggles to get his legs over
The flushed, surprised, clover.

In How Now! Alan Moore treats themes of love, evil, and personal loss with gentle humour and tough seriousness. He evokes memories of Ireland in the sixties, seventies and eighties, capturing flashes of awareness from childhood, youth and adult years with masterful description of emotion and settings.

This absorbing work is his second collection of poems, following Opia, a Poetry Book Society Choice in 1986, which was described by Ciaran Carty as ‘a virtuoso first collection’.