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Hints and Disguises
Marianne Moore and Her Contemporaries
Celeste Goodridge
University of Iowa Press, 1989

The first book-length exploration of Marianne Moore's prose focuses on her private and public critical exchanges with Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and T.S. Eliot. Drawing on previously unpublished material from the Moore Archive—correspondence, notebooks, manuscript notes, and books—Celeste Goodridge establishes Moore's central role as both poet-critic and prose stylist, providing a new perspective for considering Moore in relation to her contemporaries.

With clarity and elegance, Goodridge shows that Moore's most compelling critical judgments can best be recovered by examining the relationship between her private disclosures and her public pronouncements; her aesthetic of "hints and disguises" reveals a tension between what she felt free to voice and what she chose to veil.

In writing about these four poets, Moore made her greatest contribution to modernist criticism. With unusual perspicacity, she anticipated and defined many of the critical debates which still surround these writers' projects. Furthermore, Moore's critical exchanges indicated that her deepest alliances were with Stevens and Pound and not, as most have argued, with Williams and Eliot.

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Hints of His Mortality
David Borofka
University of Iowa Press, 1996

The award-winning stories in David Borofka's Hints of His Mortality focus on the male of the species, on bewildered, guilt-ridden, hypersensitive characters adrift in a sea of changing roles and expectations. Although they yearn for the ideal—whether physical or spiritual—and for that sense of divine connection suggested by Wordsworth's Intimations of Immortality, they usually end up settling for what seems the next best thing: sex or religion.

The amorous scrimmage between male and female in these taut, intense stories is a contest that leaves no one unmarked. The hapless ministers in Borofka's memorable collection find that their daily grind of professional piety leaves them with more questions than answers. The men and boys in Hints of His Mortality are always aware of their flaws, for Borofka's vital characters have the capacity to register the shadows of their every blemish. Like Ferguson of the title story, haunted for twenty years by his failures of conscience, each protagonist experiences the inexorable fallibility of his own nature, agonizes over his moral weakness, and longs for escape from this life in which “our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting." Yet each is redeemed by his ongoing struggle for compassion and understanding.

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