The Moon Is Almost Full

by Chana Bloch

Chana Bloch's newest poetry collection, The Moon is Almost Full, focuses frankly and tenderly on the themes of aging and death. Bloch doesn't shy away from the dark places, but she is a trustworthy guide. These remarkable poems remind the reader to take joy where we can find it and relish the everyday.
Bloch's clear and direct voice makes her poems accessible favorites for all readers. Anyone interested in poetry dealing with aging, cancer, family relationships, and Judaism.

Genres: Poetry

88 pages, Paperback

Published September 5, 2017

About the author

Chana Bloch was an American poet, translator, and scholar. She was a professor emerita of English at Mills College in Oakland, California.

Reviews

[Rebecca]

This was a lucky find in the clearance section at Blackwell’s, Oxford. It’s a beautifully produced book from Autumn House, the small Pittsburgh press that released my favorite poetic work of last year: The Small Door of Your Death by Sheryl St. Germain. This was Bloch’s sixth and final book of poetry, published in 2017, the year of her death. She writes in the awareness that this cancer will be her end and doesn’t gloss over losses of function and dignity, but still finds delight in life through her family, writing and Jewish rituals: “Never forget / you were put on earth to gather joy // with melancholy hands” (from “Instructions for the Bridegroom”). A favorite poem was “The Will,” in which she imagines how the physical and intangible relics of her life will be distributed (“My plans and projects I hereby bequeath to the air / of which they were conceived. … Let the doctors pack up my heart / and keep it humming for the right customer.”).

Off-topic note: This was typeset in Mrs Eaves, which may well be one of my favorite fonts.

[Rick]

Bloch, a translator from Hebrew of Amichai and a teacher, passed away just before this collection was published. It is a beautiful testimony to her life and her vocation, with powerful poems about life, terminal illness, friends, family, sex, love, memory, and purpose. The poems are wonders in their own right, apart from the circumstances. Lyrical, wry, observant, telling. They are rooted in her love of wisdom and her Jewish heritage with a fine critical ear for the false and sentimental. The poem Three Wishes asks,

“What are you saving the third wish for?

You’ve lived on roots, slept on straw,
looked down a well so deep
you couldn’t see bottom.

The horizon is just beginning
to tighten its wire
around you—

That’s not a cloth of gold,
just the setting sun
gilding the windows.”

The poem Eros in its entirety:

“The way one touch
invites another
till it takes just a breath,
a shudder,
the tip of the tongue.

Or the way a word,
a blurt of language
on the page,
may beget a poem.

It needs the dark to grow.
Give it time and enough
of your darkness.
You already have within you
more than enough.”

Sex, love, creativity—that spark, that touch that ignites more, that animates life. These are poems pulled almost randomly, and here’s another, Moon Over Menlo Place:

“The moon is almost full
or just past fullness.
Never mind. Up there in the milky spill
it’s a good enough moon
for the likes of us,

though God knows we’d prefer
the gold-spangled moons of Jupiter,
Galileo’s moons,
mantled in oceans and ice and inconceivable life,

the four with their storied names,
Io, Europa, Ganymede, Callisto,
lovers of Jove the Insatiable, ravished
and held in his gravitational pull.

What a glory to know the sun
doesn’t rise or set for us!

The moon over Menlo Place,
that old lovers’ moon, our one and only—
let’s take it, love,
moon dust and all.”

This remarkable collection is here for us, moon dust and all. Do let’s take it.

[Diana Marie Denza]

I feel touched and honored to have read Chana Bloch’s final collection. Her observations about nature, faith, family, old age, and living while dying were profound. Bloch lived, loved, and left the world with a very special gift. Read this.

[Cody Stetzel]

Chana has lived a life that I admire. She is contemplating death in ways that no poet who is living without the proximity to death can write about it.