Review: Moon Grammar

Moon Grammar by Matthew Porto
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I can’t be too objective, about what I think of this book because I am so proud simply to be holding it. Matt was my student several years ago, and it is one of those rewarding moments as a teacher to see how much he has grown and how much he has achieved.

That said, this is a beautiful book, one that meditates carefully on a sweeping set of images and concerns.

We open with the beautiful piece “The Angel Speaks” in which an angel, one unusual for its interest in the doings of humankind, makes us a promise. Instead of blinding us with overwhelming light, it promises us that we must “get used to the light.”

That notion is just one of the themes that runs throughout this fine collection. The first poem in the third section, Endings, called “Ultimate Thule,” talks not of an angel, but of a friend who has swum out to a buoy in the water. As the last line goes, “the last I saw of you, a handful of light.”

Those two poems in dialogue offer a fast-paced overview of the arc of the collection. We move from the perspective of angels meditating on Jacob and Rachel meeting over the well and falling in love. Then Matt explores that image in three or four different poems, conjuring a moment that’s both distant in time and immediate in its intimacy.

From there, we get a series of poems that deal increasingly with archaeological experiences, whether in Ithaca or in medieval England. We are no longer quite from the vantage of Angels, but rather of humans whose experiences are just outside something we can come to know.

As such, the book has a beautiful sweep, a sense of moving from the heavenly through the historical, and finally to a sense of Matt’s personal experiences.

I also have a handful of favorite poems throughout this. Of course, I cannot help but appreciate “Our Eden.” We are told below the title that it is set Scranton, and Matt imagines his college days as Edenic. In the shadow of the perspective of the angels, that seems almost funny, but it’s not a lighthearted poem. It’s a young man looking back at a moment that seemed as if it would last forever, being in love with someone in a dumpy college apartment. In that light, graduation is a kind of departure from Eden.

As I said at the start, it’s deeply satisfying to see how far he has come even as he imagines himself still in that same dumpy apartment in the Hill neighborhood off of campus.
I also really love “From Her Diary: Venice.” Matt talks of visiting Venice with a girlfriend and, among other things, looking for the grave of Ezra Pound. He says at the end of the poem, having found the grave and moving on:

“It is sinking,/ we always hear in the news, forever sinking into the Earth,/ but from our low view on the water,/ it rose and rose until it covered the sky.”

And then, in the final poem, “Epigone: The Latecomer,” we get these concluding lines:

“some light, it’s true, makes it to us, but always/ refractory, errant, struggling to deign downward”

Beautiful stuff, stuff to make me proud and to make me think.



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