Book Review: This Moment is Gone

Abstract

This Moment Is Gone. By George Goode. New York; McNally Jackson, 2014. 72 pp. $15.00 (paper).George Goode a poet who has stepped into the Heraclitian stream one too many times. In his first collection of poems, This Moment Is Gone, Goode probes the ontological problems of presence and change. Trying to reconcile the subjective moment with the relentlessness of nature in time, Goodes poems offer hope through restless surrender.Goode, a native of Virginias verdant and ancient Shenandoah Valley, reveres nature as a means of memory while recognizing the limitation that nature presents. Goodes response in Blue Ridge acceptance and embrace: I see them clearly writes Goode of Virginia's storied mountains, without shame or nostalgia / these contours, friends, distant and at hand, / who define both nobility and the limits of my being (p. 72). The contemplation of these familiar blue friends opens the poet to both limitation and its antidote: presence. The mountains, which define the limits of the valley with their bulk and the poets transience with their intransience, are placeholders for Goode as he tries to understand his own fleeting subjectivity.The same dichotomy put another way in Still. Goode writes: shines. Still is (p. 42). For Goode, a moving gleam of refracted light motion and presence, a moment and a moving line. Stillness arrested motion, a kind of ending. But there an eye-catching beauty to the still-ness, which not simply the cessation of movement, but rather the enduring of the still here.Goode grapples with these notions of stillness and motion throughout This Moment Is Gone. Notably his first collection, the book an adventure in describing the moving moment, by a poet who painfully self-aware of his own mysterious ephemerality. In Second Self, Goode imagines that someone in you has gotten up / and walked out, slamming the door, / never to be seen again (p. 1). The poet's inability to understand his own selfhood, desires, and potentialities inspires pursuit: Now you must get up and try to find him / in another time zone, the poet exhorts. Having broken through / the cocoon that insulated your old future, / he's already there living the authentic life (p. 1). There's always more out there, and the possibility of many futures indwells us. But we remain cut off from these possibilities, by time and by our own limitation.In light of these realities, Goode sobered. …