No Moon is a book of poems about the powers and misadventures of memory, about chancy intimacies and unquiet departures parceled out as time, loss, death - an almanac of forces that mystify and transform our everyday lives. The landscapes of the poems - now borrowed from the poet's childhood in suburbia, now glimpsed from a train passing out of Kalamazoo, now drawn from a traveler's memories of the moors and cow pastures of Cornwall - evince the homelessness of a people to whom we all belong, a people at the mercy of things they cannot see; the stars are hidden by fog, the night is moonless, and the houses drift at the edge of the dark. What is it, then, we are steering by, the poet asks of the street outside her window: "Once the last remembered house blinks out / it's all dead reckoning, / whimsy or currents, wind, a lazy minute hand / as I think my way past any hope of sleep." These poems offer heartfelt and intelligent talk to the reader as intimate, pursuing thought, spanning the distances between star magnitudes and the bland topography of suburban lawns. Eimers celebrates vanishings - the brief illuminations of fireworks, phone calls, language, friends. The elegiac cast of her poetry remains hopeful somehow, awake to the ripples the absent create in the present, gone friends in the living, and quiet streets in the endless stories we tell each other.
