Moon for Sale

The poems in Richard Price's Moon for Sale delight in linguistic play, turning over sound and sense with gleeful dexterity. But they are equally visually sensitive: Price's lyricism speaks as much to a cinematic sensibility as to a poetic one, to Terrence Malick's Tree of Life, to the carefully braided documentaries of Viera Cakanyova, and to the elegiac filmscapes of Margaret Tait. In the shadow of a culture in which even the moon is up for auction, Moon for Sale records the decadence of our times by incorporating and repurposing that culture's language. At the same time a haven of meaning is sought in the erotic, in the intimate transactions between bodies, that 'rush of unclevering' which both simplifies and intensifies the world.