"Clinging to my backpack,
I walked the deadened streets.
Waiting for a happy face,
Or ground to chain my feet."
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Scenes the Writer Shows by MB Moshe Trafford Publishing
book review by John E. Roper
In the past poets sometimes penned their verse on an epic scale or, if opting for shorter pieces, forced their musings into the shape of odes, sonnets, and other regimented forms. Modern poets for the most part have broken with these traditions, choosing instead to write freely with often only a loose sense of structure. Moshe, in this first collection of his poetry, retains a bit of both worlds in his verse. While frequently choosing to rely on common patterns of meter, rhyme, and stanza structure, he occasionally veers away from established patterns to chart his own course.
Offering snapshots of his life, the lives of others, and of the many places he has journeyed to, Moshe has cobbled together a collection that reads at times like a confessional and at others like a poetic travelogue. He shows his strengths as an observer especially in the latter type of poems and manages to craft for his readers a competent verbal picture of all he sees. In some cases, such as in the poem "The Best Farthings Spent," he goes one step further by including photographs that complement what he is describing. A unique feature of this poem and of some of the others written in a similar vein is that he adopts the region's dialect and vocabulary to heighten the piece's effectiveness.
Whether describing the bar scene in Ireland, the slow shuffle of a hustler through town, or a supposed friend who expresses surprise that the author actually wrote a book by himself, Moshe's poems exude a rare vitality and function as the perfect vehicles for the poet to show readers the world as he sees it.