The music playing and the closeness of the people in the small room of the car, juxtaposed against the harsh winter outside, gives this section its tenderness and intimacy. In addition, when Moore writes, “Driving the December road to St. Paul,” he infers that the speaker and his companion are arriving from somewhere else, perhaps Spoleto, and have experienced a sense of unexpected relief (“actually paradise”) at this winter homecoming.

The ample white space around these small, spare poems seems to echo the word ‘invisible’ from the title; Moore leaves as much out as he chooses to write down. The effect is one of never quite arriving at a destination, but being fully immersed in the journey…

Yet the “little streets of St. Paul / that lead nowhere” (“Trying to Leave St. Paul”) contain a suppressed dread, as in the lines further down: “How far away / it is possible to go from St. Paul / in a single night of raucous dreams” (p. 37). In contrast, Spoleto is like a delightfully eccentric relative: “How can you not love a country where the meter maids wear high heels?” (p. 87), a line from a long prose poem titled “My Swallows Again,” which closes the book.

This final poem, written in sentences that spread across the page and are separated by spaces, is a different style from all of the other poems in the book (short lines with regular indentations). Its tone and topic, however, are consistent with the rest. “My Swallows Again” expresses the inner and outer worlds of the poet as he describes the scenery around him, the people who populate it, and muses on aging and death. Spoleto, in spite of its vitality, is filled with old men, rain, and “my death nearby” (p. 86). The only references to youth are “stupid teenage boys” (p. 86) and the pointless act of replacing a sidewalk: “I hope they understand how short life is” (p. 86). And yet, in spite of these repeated references, the poem is punctuated with humor, as in

Some of these poems might seem facile, as in “On This Cloudy May Day:” “I keep thinking / maybe June is what I need / to make me happy ” (p. 7). However, Moore’s very short poems can and do work, as in “Gradually, That Half-Smile:” “my father so often wore as he got older / takes me on as a project ” (p. 79). The ample white space around these small, spare poems seems to echo the word “invisible” from the title; Moore leaves as much out as he chooses to write down. The effect is one of never quite arriving at a destination, but being fully immersed in the journey itself. Moore’s line, “God forbid I ever become so calm” (p. 42) from “Instead of Calm,” reminds us that even as age and death claim us, we must not give in to apathy and torpor.