[Tim Murphy]

The Room Within
Moore Moran
The Swallow Press, 2010

Caveat lector: Mike Moran is my friend, mentor, co-religionist and fellow Irish-American, so
I do not approach this marvelous collection in a dispassionate way. He’s one of those rara aves who can write equally well in form or freely, confirming again what my old tutor, Robert Penn Warren told me at seventeen: “Boy, if you want to write free verse, first you have to learn how to write in meter and rhyme.”

I tend to like Moran best when he is at his most formal, most concise, most spiritual. But I like everything in this book, his first in a decade, and I am very grateful to Swallow, whose specialty is poets of the American West, for giving us this generous sampling from one of Ivor Winter’s greatest Stanford students. Here’s a poem that utterly delights me.

The Truth Concerning the Pizza in Monterey

Custom House Cafe stood on this spot, straddling
Pier and sea wall like a fisherman gaffing catch.
It was here, in Forty-Six, that Carlos brought pizza
To the county--hand-pounding his dough flats so fine
That when he spun them at the ceiling, light
From the harbor shone through.

At the great iron oven he would hand them out crackling,
Bubbling real Mafia mozzarella,
Tomato so fresh it sassed you all the way down;
Crust edges: buttery popover. Friday nights,
Ramirez and I downed two extra-larges per, hardly pausing
To pull on longnecks so cold chunks of ice

Still knocked around inside the bottles. Today
You can only get pizza at the franchise parlors in town
Where the freshest thing going is the waiters.
And nobody tosses anymore. Instead, they pancake
Their wheat-germy dough through rubber wringers
Lifted from old washing machines in the junkyard.

I responded to Mike via email:
“I just completely cracked up on your Pizza poem. We still have a pizzeria like that in Fargo, where the dough is thrown. Duane came here from Naples Pizza in New Haven, yeah the ORIGINAL joint. (You can imagine how much Naples Pizza I ate on my all-nighters.) I'm thinking, hmm, tastes just like home! Duane died many years ago but not before teaching his son to make a perfect thin crust pizza.

My ideological opponent but old friend, Senator Byron Dorgan, always flew into Fargo rather than Bismarck so he could eat Duane's pizza, even though that left him a 200 mile drive to the state capital. But trust Byron to fly fifteen hundred and drive two hundred miles for the perfect pizza.”

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