In a House of Secret Rooms
by Tom Moran
24 Poems ~ 32 pages
Price: $15.00
Publisher: Cyberwit.net
ISBN #: 978-93-6354-742-1
To Order: Amazon.com
Reviewed by Michael Escoubas
In his Pulitzer Prize winning villanelle, “The Waking,” Theodore Roethke, reveals an important life-application for the written word:
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.
Writing on the back cover of his latest project, In a House of Secret Rooms, Tom Moran bears witness to the power of “The Waking” on his life:
This poem struck a chord with me that continued throughout my life.
And what was this chord? For Tom, the repeated line “we learn by going where we have to go” illustrates that humans, often go by feelings rather than by intellect. I have taken the liberty of assigning Rooms to selected poems. (This is your reviewer’s doing, not the poet’s.) My goal is to show that this talented craftsman infuses his work with a mature balance between intellectual acumen and heartfelt emotion. Only the best poets do this well. I feel an affinity with Tom. I, too, call upon poetry as shelter, as perspective, as a source of spiritual renewal. Apart from poetry there a places and spaces I dare not go.
Tom’s style is conversational. He invites me into his life with a warmth devoid of pretension. I resonate with “Old Calendars.” At year’s end Tom reviews his life: dates for dinners with friends, doctor’s appointments, wedding anniversary, when he retired, and more. This is the poet’s Reflection Room, where:
I flip over pages of
a new calendar,
blank spaces
wait to be filled
like water
into an ice cube tray.
Next New Year’s Day
I’ll look back at mile posts
I leave behind.
“Purple Heart” is the poem I name as Tom’s Room of Partial Truth. At age eleven, Tom’s mother takes him to the movie Patton. Upon asking his mother why, she says, Because I want you / to see how real men are, / not like your father. Doubtless, the Patten experience was traumatic. The poem continues:
Like home,
the movie has battle scenes
of hand to hand combat.
A scene where Patton
slaps a soldier
touches a nerve.
In his mature years and through his poetry, Tom has reached that important milestone of life: Mother may have meant well, but maybe, just maybe, General Patton should not be my example of genuine manhood.
“Away,” I designate as Tom’s Healing Room:
[I] Play my harp
by how I feel,
blow notes out
I’ll never get back.
I push out
an inky black poison
of beatings I took
while keeping
my mouth shut.
Wounds heal
stitches hold.
I cross the street
catch up with my heart,
to feel again
trust again
without toppling over.
In a House of Secret Rooms, humbly conveys a poet’s journey from darkness into light, from fog into clarity. In the spirit of Theodore Roethke’s, I learn by going where I have to go, these poems anticipate the “secret rooms” of this reviewer’s life and perhaps those of others who even now, live within their own secret rooms.
“How Far to Eden” I offer as the poet’s Room of Hope:
Out from this world
I will enter a garden
filled with my loved ones.
They will be transposed
into radiant flowers.
Iris and lilac,
dahlia, delphinium,
oriental lily and hyacinth,
rose of sharon and morning glory;
ringed by a barberry bush
which burns crimson in the fall.
Like a hummingbird
searching for sweet nectar
I will visit each flower
and make a haven.
Beauty will engulf me–
not as a sun shower
but forever.
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