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Okapi by Fiona Moore
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

£10.00Price

  • 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 vegetation

     

    was 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 job

     

    once 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 off

     

    one 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 night 

     

    and 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. 

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