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UAM Writer Wins National Poetry Book Competition
(10/7/09)
MONTICELLO, AR — Dr. Robert “Red Hawk” Moore’s book-length poem,
Raven’s Paradise, has won the national Bright Hill Press Poetry Book
Competition and will be published in 2010 by Bright Hill Press.
Moore is a nationally-acclaimed author as well as a member of the Arts and
Humanities faculty at the University of Arkansas at Monticello, where he
serves as a professor of English.
Moore wrote Raven’s Paradise in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, site of the
book’s action, during a semester-long off-campus duty assignment. According
to Moore, the book (65 pages, 42 sections) is a “wild, bawdy, hilarious
freight train of a ride. It is the story of the birth of the goddess in
human history. It is also the Lucifer story told large, with Raven standing
for the Luciferian anti-hero. It is the story of Lucifer’s redemption and
enlightenment. And it is the Biblical creation-myth stood on its head.
Furthermore, it is about the enlightenment of the feminine in human history
through surrender to the Divine. Finally, is it the tale of the
enlightenment of the masculine via the presence and through the intercession
of the feminine. Its shadow influences are Shakespeare, especially Hamlet
and King Lear, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Hopkins, Whitman, Yeats and
Twain’s Huckleberry Finn.”
Nationally known Hispanic poet Rhina Espaillat was the contest’s final
judge. The competition featured 250 manuscripts which were narrowed to 22
finalists.
Espaillat praised Raven's Paradise as “so packed with pleasure that I
was distressed when I reached the last page, disappointed that there was no
more of it to read. There is pleasure, first, for the five senses – that
essential sign of genuine poetry at work – and then pleasure for the
imagination, in the bold details of the unfolding narrative and the way they
draw the reader into the action from the poem's opening line until the very
last. And finally, there is enduring pleasure for the intellect, in the way
the poet summons up material we all know but places it in the challenging
light of an entirely new sensibility.
“This delightful, outrageous, profound, wise and hilarious creation story
takes on the mythology and the sacred writings of various cultures, delves
into philosophy, sex, history and human nature, and nods gracefully to
Shakespeare, Hopkins, Dickinson, Yeats and Whitman, among others. I'm hoping
– as a reader, for purely selfish reasons – to encounter much more in the
future from this highly original American voice.”
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