Moira Magneson
Moira Magneson
Over the years, Moira Magneson has worked as a river guide, artist’s model, truck driver, television writer, editor, and community college writing instructor. A Northern California native, she lives in the Sierra foothills where she has spearheaded many art actions and initiatives, including El Dorado County’s Poetry Out Loud Competition, Veterans’ Voices, Barbaric Yawp, and Black Lives: An American Overture. In 2024, she was the resident poet for ForestSong, a community arts project exploring solastalgia, biophilia, and resilience in the face of wildfire devastation. Magneson is the author of A River Called Home: A River Fable, an illustrated novella (Toad Road Press, 2024). In the Eye of the Elephant is her first full-length collection of poems.
In the Eye of the Elephant
Moira Magneson’s first full-length poetry collection is a constellation of lyric, narrative, and experimental poems whose subjects are the wild and the creatures that inhabit that space. Rooted primarily in a Western landscape and infused with Buddhist notions of interconnection and impermanence, the book is divided into three parts, with the first exploring our paradoxical relationship to animals: our sometimes unbearable yearning to merge with their mystery alongside our inclination, conscious or not, to destroy them. The book then shifts its gaze to poems that spotlight human precarity, our frailties and shortcomings. In the final section, the aperture widens, revealing a more inclusive depth of field, while moving toward a growing acceptance of the dark and bright and coming to terms with the beautiful ruin of our imperfect world.
Book Reviews
Moira Magneson’s In the Eye of the Elephant is an extraordinary collection of poems. I’ve rarely seen a book so exquisite in its centering of the natural world or in its honoring of the animal within us as well as those animals alongside us. Yet these poems are also dazzling and explosive in their reckonings with personal family wreckage, and so deeply moving, so deeply consoling in both their private and public grieving. Magneson writes, “I praise Earth as it is, its holy cup my heaven.” What a timely balm this book will be to its readers, and what a treasure of visionary human compassion they will find.
—David St. John, author of Prayer for My Daughter
I am drawn to Moira Magneson’s poems for the grime and gristle of their language—“elisions and plosives swept / piecemeal and stained // off the slaughterhouse floor”—for storytelling that stares pain in the face and delivers a hard-earned, unexpected beauty that is possible because of a clear-eyed placement in the natural world. This world is not romanticized but instead made wondrous through images that invite readers to consider their own station in the wild. In the Eye of the Elephant is rewarding on numerous levels; I’ll come back to it again and again.
—Albert Garcia, author of A Meal Like That