50 Years of the Moose

On July 15, 1972, The New Yorker published a long poem by Elizabeth Bishop, "The Moose," now regarded a masterpiece. In "50 Years of the Moose" the Surrey Street Poets have come together to honor "The Moose," by stretching their own poetic voices in ways that respond to Bishop's achievement, while allowing them to explore ideas and themes relevant to them as individual poets. In the mix of poems, the moose is seen as sacrament, sacrifice and transformation. It is compared with a New England church and lovingly parodied. Still other Surrey Street poets aim to capture the moose's solitude and resilience in the environment of northern New England.

The poetic forms presented in this collection range from sonnet and villanelle to haiku, prose poems, monologue, dialogue, and free verse. Each section of the anthology is taken from phrases in Bishop's poem.

"The Moose" is a work that lives deep in the poetic consciousness of contemporary writers. For the Surrey Street Poets, much of the satisfaction of writing these poems arose from letting this consciousness come to the surface in a way not unlike encountering a moose on a country road at night.