[In the following essay, O'Brien discusses Wanted Alive, contending that it is Mouré's attempt at understanding and exploring the human heart.]

Throughout her poems Erin Mouré mixes memory and desire—a tenacious memory which sometimes rearranges the present, and a desire to see into the ephemeral future. She has spoken of the past as constantly metamorphosing, and of the future as nothing more than the "present falling forward." In her most recent collection of poems, Wanted Alive, she speaks of the crumbling boundaries which arbitrarily divide simultaneous time. In "Apocalypse, For Spencer," the last poem in the volume, she speaks of past, present, and future in the same breath:

        There is no memory but
        what has fled,
                      scaling the fences.
        The angels of the apocalypse are housewives
        after all, well-printed, dusting chairs

Here the past is slippery at best, and the future encompassed in the daily tasks of the present. This is poetry of the eternal instant—neither moral nor particularly philosophic, but attentive, observant, and descriptive, if we can talk of "describing" ideas the same way we can talk of describing things. Later in the same poem Mouré brings together idea and substance, thought and thing: "An ordinary fact of the street, like / the saint in his dressing gown, head tipping the roof-tiles / between houses, preaching to hens."

In this poem, and in many others from Wanted Alive, Mouré does not want to present, as many poets do, prefabricated thoughts. What she gives us instead are ideas which reverberate in our minds, ideas which vibrate with their own energy and which necessitate our involvement. The poems are expansive rather than conclusive. Here is the end of "Apocalypse, For Spencer":

        the Resurrected climb out of thin graves in Cookham
        onto grass so green, kissing between their hands
        The astonished stigmata
        that the artist gave them, a shy passion touching
        their arms & washed bodies:
        Their embrace coloured gently & made
        Entire, a family

We are left with the stigmata on our hands, a passion which touches. And the book closes with an enigmatic reference to a family, as though everyone is somehow mysteriously implicated. Many of the poems end this way, in mid-thought, as does "Reading Nietzsche," which ends "Madness, yet"; "Old Friends," which ends "The letter she sent, asking you"; and "Subliminal Code," which ends "That the leaves burn so long in the trees, / they flicker & will not go out, refusing this:".

As the ideas within the poems are constantly in movement, the "setting" of many of the poems is also concerned with motion. Mouré has worked for VIA Rail for the past nine years and spends much of her time on the train between Vancouver and Winnipeg. In the introduction to Going for Coffee: An Anthology of Contemporary North American Working Poems, Tom Wayman talks about the difference between those who write about the world outside their work experiences and those who write from inside these experiences. He states that the poems in Going for Coffee are

written by men and women who have done and/or are doing the jobs they write about…. This writing deals with the present: what it is like to work at these jobs, and what effects the jobs have on the life of the poet and his or her co-workers both at work and off. Humour, anecdote, and precise detail make up the substance of these poems.

Mouré writes many poems about the daily rituals of train travel, about travelling the same tracks over and over again but at the same time seeing new things, or the same things anew, each time. The syntax of the poems follows the muscular fluidity of train travel: there is a movement forward yet always a sideways jarring motion which tends to keep things off balance. In "Seven Rail Poems" the train is a combination of feeling and brute strength. It is treated sympathetically, but not romanticized:

        Wheels sing against the rail, shearing metal, the train pulls
        mightily
        snaking down the Canyon with us
        caved in its belly

As the train pulls itself forward, so also the words extend across the page. Neither the train nor the line lengths lull the reader. The movement forward is always qualified or complicated by the strength and noise of machinery. The train becomes animated, but not necessarily friendly. These lines recall "The Death of the Ball Turrett Gunner" [by Randall Jarrell], where the speaker is hunched in the belly of his aircraft: although there is a sensual bonding between person and machine, the symbiosis is not sentimental. In Mouré's poems the speaker often becomes less animated as the train becomes more animated. There are no clear distinctions in these poems; both train and passenger are part machine and part person.

In "VIA: Tourism," Mouré talks about the "tourists" who frequent the trains:

       Then there are the women beaten by their husbands
       who bear the marks
       as they bore their children,
       without disgrace,
       who bring their children away with them
       across the country in coach seats or
       jammed into one berth
       drinking pepsi, eating aspirin
       Locked in the motion of rails, of constant arrival

The anecdote and precise detail of which Wayman speaks is present in these lines, but there is little humour here. The ironic title, the unsettling pun on the word "berth," and the picture of a woman eating aspirins all provide images of the desperate optimism which informs much of Mouré's work. The final line of this passage is full of contradictory information: "Locked" (stasis), "in the motion" (movement), "of rails" (static, yet they move clear across the country), "of constant" (perpetual movement), "arrival" (one moment). Any freedom discussed in the poem seems always undercut, and any stability always on the verge of disintegration.

The title of the collection, Wanted Alive, alludes, of course, to the old adage from TV westerns: "Wanted Dead or Alive." Although Mouré's shortening of the adage asserts the positive, the negative is clearly in sight as well. In many of the poems life and death are inextricably bound. As she says in one of the notes to her poems: "MTX holds both death and life; what can kill you is also the same thing that has come to save you." This argument between life and death is present in such poems as "Fantastic World's End," "Tonight My Body," and "Tricks," with its disarmingly simple title:

        I feel I am in the world & there is no god in it with me.
        These days my husband gets up & sits
        on the edge of our bed & says
        a case of whisky is one drink.
        He says there are glasses as big as women filled with rye &
          he wants
        to marry one.
        This is what I listen to, no wonder
        I can't sleep.
        Faintly
        I hear the heart-tick of my old dog in Calgary, 800 miles
          away.
        She sleeps on the porch, & shies away when the footsteps
        come, crying gently.
        When there are no footfalls, she rests & waits to die.

The characters in many of Mouré's poems are victims of nonchalant evil, of discomfort which is familiar enough to be almost soothing. The women in "Tricks," "The Bearded Lady Tells Her Story Late at Night While Drunk in the Bar," and "Strip/La Baleine" are all desperately attempting to hang on to what little goodness they can discover in what appears to be a male-dominated world. In "Strip/La Baleine" the woman is asked: "O Whale in our applause do you sense love?" The love that is present in these poems is never far from alienation and estrangement.

In a recent essay on Mary di Michele, Robert Billings talks about di Michele's "persistent and sympathetic exploration of feeling" ["Discovering the Sizes of the Heart: The Poems of Mary di Michele," Essays on Canadian Writing, No. 27, Winter, 1983–1984]. It is interesting to note that in a recent poem ["Coffee"] Mouré talks about "explosions of feeling." Mouré's poems are concerned with the strangeness and despair which compose love, with the harsh expression of feeling. In her first book, Empire, York Street (1979), she talks about the bruised air of the jumbled present. In Wanted Alive she continues this exploration, digging deeper, through fractured syntax, to the place where feelings first break into life, and to the place where feelings begin to dissolve. In Empire, York Street she talks about an ancient alphabet. In Wanted Alive she also continues this exploration, attempting to see further derivations of her own internal code and by doing so attempting to understand how the heart works, how sympathy works, how work works. Mouré, as the title Wanted Alive suggests, is a poet on the run, perhaps not away from anything, but rather toward a more complete understanding of what she calls in one poem "The short & bumpy sentences of the heart."