The poems in Writing the Silences represent more than 60 years of Richard O. Moore's work as a poet. Selected from seven full-length manuscripts written between 1946 and 2008, these
poems reflect not only Moore's place in literary history-he is the last of his generation of the legendary group of San Francisco Renaissance poets-but also his reemergence into today's
literary world after an important career as a filmmaker and producer in public radio and television. In her foreword, Brenda Hillman describes meeting the soft-spoken Moore at a writers'
conference and working with him over a decade to finalize the poems in the present volume. Writing the Silences reflects Moore's commitment to freedom of form, his interest in language
itself, and his dedication to issues of social justice and ecology. When asked to explain what his poetry is "about," Moore once replied: "It is the means I employ to explain the world to
myself within the interface of perception and language."
