Published on 17 September 2024
ISBN: 978-1-915108-23-4
Fiona Moore asks “am I really here/ in gaelic they say in an island not on it” and, as readers, we might begin preparing ourselves for an immersive experience. Okapi is a single, book-length poem, set mostly on (in!) a Hebridean island during the pandemic. Moore’s rich descriptions recreate the island as a living protagonist: the subject of reflection, memory, destruction, loss (symbolised by the rare okapi, a favourite animal in her childhood zoo), beauty and resilience, a meeting point of substance and dream:
is it possible to be in the real island and the dream island
at the same time
to inhabit the real as if in that haze
or inhabit the haze as if real
*
“The calm yet faceted language of Moore’s luscious music spectacularly recovers the joys of landscape. I enjoyed the authority of the voice in service of the natural world and its precarity. A moving and exciting sequence of poetry.” —Daljit Nagra
From a review of Fiona Moore’s debut collection, The Distal Point:
“Moore’s is a rare gift. We occasionally encounter artists... who work at the limits of the known, of the utterable. Their work is shamanistic – rooted to experience, woven from the fabric of the universe. Moore would doubtless contend this quasi-spiritual claptrap, but her work achieves this.” —John Field
Okapi by Fiona Moore
today among wintry browns of sedge
dried heather and unnameable pale grasses
and sphagnum moss whose crimson and chartreuse
cushions you can sink your fingers in
to clutch the cold softness of water
and breathe the gentle acrid smell of
peat and damp vegetationwas a sharp shock of colours
scarlet and yellow warning signs
on a cache of black plastic containers labelled
FENCE POST FINISHING KIT
bursting out of a plastic sack that shed
white flakes like old paint liberated
from the rigours of chemical waste disposal
*
once upon a time a cabinet office meeting
discussed a paper on dispersal
of the soviet nuclear arsenal
I asked why the analysis of each danger
didn’t include a risk assessment
of probability and impact
to help us prioritise
and the dark suits looked at me as if
at an alien
afterwards I didn’t pursue the principle
being too busy doing my jobonce upon a time at a team awayday
we had to step into a four-paned window
taped on the floor the aim being
to find out our preferences for where
to stand in a team space I was
the leader and stood at an edge
I felt I could see more clearly from there
did this make me a bad leader
*
once upon a time there was a ghost
in the big house where we were guests
on our first visit to the first island
a chieftain they said lay under the hillock nearby
his broadsword hung in the hall
its long sweep of metal dull and pocked
and the edge when I fingered it blunt
if you touch a sword it should cut you
then an adult explained how
wielded with force it would take your head offone night everyone went to a ceilidh
leaving my little sister and me
alone with nightlights flickering
shapes onto varnished pitch-pine walls
the grown-ups would be crossing the wheatfield
unlatching the five-barred metal gate with moulded
end-posts and cream paint bled pink by rust
and walking down the dark cloud of the woods
*
sleepless was the wait for the ghost who
arrived on a blast of air
in that still nightand blew out the nightlights
was there was there there was
someone there
Fiona Moore lives in Greenwich, London. Her first collection, The Distal Point (HappenStance Press, 2018), was a Poetry Book Society recommendation and shortlisted for the T S Eliot prize and the Seamus Heaney first collection prize. Before this she published two pamphlets, also with HappenStance: The Only Reason for Time, a Guardian poetry book of the year in 2013, and Night Letter, shortlisted for the 2015 Michael Marks Award.
She is a member of Magma’s editorial board, editing issues themed for climate change (2018) and islands (2023). Before that she was assistant editor at The Rialto. She is part of the group reviving Poetry in Aldeburgh for 2024. She campaigns on climate and environmental issues.
Okapi, her second book, comes out of nearly two years living in the Outer Hebrides.