We the People

We the People: Confessions of a Caucasian Southerner 

By Harry Moore 

Broadstone Books, 2024 

Paperback: $28.75 

Genre: Poetry 

Reviewed by Edward Journey 

In our current urgent age of reckoning, poet Harry Moore has written a collection of poems that recall a time that might seem remote to some. Moore evokes the memories of the past that must be reconciled with the present, as these poems – many of them autobiographical – wrestle with a personal legacy that Moore now realizes was privileged and blinkered. 

We the People: Confessions of a Caucasian Southerner is Harry Moore’s seventh and most recent poetry collection. Moore lives in Decatur after over four decades of teaching in Alabama community colleges. In this latest book, he ponders, at times, his own inaction. Looking back on an unpleasant family encounter in “Revive Us Again,” the speaker regrets that he, “in shame and surprise // … fled into a world / I lacked courage to change.”  

Many of these poems take on an elegiac tone. Tuskegee Airmen, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, and the Scottsboro Boys all get a nod. Herman Shaw, a “survivor” of the syphilis study, is remembered in two poems. In “Herman Shaw (II),” Shaw is being honored at the White House, says he can forgive, forget. Moore writes, “Is this possible – after / the ships, the auction blocks, the war, / a state constitution bloated and tangled / to block freedom at every turn, lynchings / to breed fear and cowering …” 

Many of the poems are personal profiles of experiences and personalities observed during childhood. They often recall the ways in which racism becomes ingrained in youth. In one poem, Tuskegee veterinarians arrive to care for a family heifer whose calf is too big to birth. The vets’ “light color and crisp speech” make the family wonder “where they might be from.” A poem titled “Micro-Aggressions: You People” is followed closely by a series of poems called “Micro-Civilities,” which regard all-too-familiar situations as well as a rush to judgment. 

The clunky subtitle, “Confessions of a Caucasian Southerner,” seems, perhaps, superfluous; any astute reader will quickly discover the impetus and theme of these poems without the titular prompt. There are lyrical depictions of rural life and civility throughout, often tinged with the stain of painful memories and collective insensitivity. The poem “A New Earth: 1955,” dedicated to Rosa Parks, is my favorite poem in the collection. It presents the annual cycle of a cotton field while aiming forward to larger truths and “a new planting, for / a harvest like none we’d ever known.” That poem soars in the subtlety and surprise of its approach.   

Moore’s poems often make me think of the social justice chant, “Say Their Names.” In fact, two poems, “Isham’s Will” and “Inventory: Ransom’s Estate,” take their language and names directly from actual legal documents – hypnotically impassive lists of names of enslaved human beings. Moore’s attentive approach to language is emphasized by the etymologies that introduce certain poems: Moor, privilege, reparations, segregate…  

Harry Moore’s We the People provides insights into slices of life in a segregated and complicated South – past and present. Lush descriptions of pastoral scenes give way to brutal reminders of chattel slavery and its enduring aftermath. We the People is honest poetry of searing insight, memory sans sentimentality, and blunt reckoning. 

Edward Journey, a retired university professor and theatre professional living in Birmingham, regularly shares his essays in the online journal “Professional Southerner” (www.professionalsoutherner.com).