It was like [Moore] to infuse the natural world with a sense of human willfulness, and like her also to derive moral sustenance from nature. She took as heroes—a word she used with unabashed frequency—not only people but a variety of flora and fauna….

In even her earliest poems it is notoriously difficult to glean the influences on her work. The cool and often prosaic language, the interlaced quotations from obscure books, newspaper ads, scientific reports, the use of titles as first lines, the odd, intricate stanzaic configurations—these and many other traits created a mutant strain in English-language verse not easily tracked to its genetic forebears.

The recently re-released Complete Poems, indispensable and handsome though it is, does not present the entirety its title promises. (p. 33)

She could be cloyingly whimsical. Her characteristic obliquity, which often took the form of curious negatives ("unperfunctoriness," "unpugnacious," "unparticularities...