The tightrope walk of grief, Fiona Moore's The Distal Point

When reading in London alongside Fiona Moore last week, I was reminded just how difficult it is to write about grief without seeming maudlin. If Moore’s first full collection, The Distal Point (HappenStance Press, 2018), is perhaps the most successful treatment of this subject since Douglas Dunn’s Elegies, how does she pull it off?

Throughout her collection, Moore is walking on a tightrope, managing to affect her readers while dodging the trap of sentimentality. She does so by employing restraint. In this context, restraint doesn’t imply emotional castration but instead the holding back of waves of feeling so that minuscule overflowing inversely becomes far more powerful than a huge flood.

One such example of her technique is the ending to ’Unknown ’, in which three characters – an imagined child, the absent partner and the first person narrator – are brought together to powerful effect:

“If you’re a ghost that walks

beside me, she is doubly so. But she

grows older with time

whereas you don’t – soon

the gap between you and me will show.”

There’s not a single adjective in this stanza. Adjectives implicitly involve personal interpretation and judgement, so Moore avoids them here. She’s seeking the layering of apparently minor details, playing off the destinies of you and she, separating them via line breaks, building up to the bald reportage of her killer final line. Like all killer final lines, it takes us back to the beginning of the poem and suggests we might start reading all over again.

The Distal Point richly deserves its recent short listing for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Maybe the only surprise is that its delicate impact should receive such recognition. Of course, the biggest personal reward for Fiona Moore is the consequent access to a larger readership. For the wider poetry community, it represents a timely reminder that craft provides us with a gateway to art and must never be underestimated. 

All-pervading absence, Fiona Moore's Night Letter

Fiona Moore’s second pamphlet, Night Letter (HappenStance Press, 2015), is very much a sequel to her first one, The Only Reason for Time (HappenStance Press, 2013).

If the earlier chapbook dealt with Moore’s grief and bereavement in the aftermath of her partner’s death, this new collection looks at what comes next. What lies beyond the immediacy of grief when the person in question has been so pivotal to you? Their absence is so all-pervading that it consumes the rest of your life. How are you to face the yawning years ahead?

In Night Letter, Moore meets these issues head-on with the same detached yet committed poetics as she displayed in her first pamphlet. Her focus is on the night-time, when nothing can interrupt the maelstrom of emotions. They veer to and fro throughout the book, expressed with exquisite linguistic skill via devices such as the use of double negatives and self-contradiction:

“…I can’t not imagine you…”

“…both nearer and further away…”

Her poem “The Embrace”, meanwhile, portrays an encounter with her dead partner in a dream. It provides us with a passage that’s key to a greater understanding of this collection:

“…We hugged and

life began to run again through my veins and bones

heart and head…”

Those afore-mentioned contradictions are brought to the fore here, implicit and intense. An embrace brings the speaker back to life, yet the other party is dead. She’s coming alive within a dream, yet the dream is condemned to end imminently and leave her in a living death. Moreover, emotional and physical life and death merge and separate and merge again. The reader is invited to compare and contrast this dream-like state of the night with the terrifying shell of the day that awaits.

Back in 2013, The Only Reason for Time seemed an immense achievement in itself, a remarkable stand-alone project. If anything, the only doubt was as to how Fiona Moore might progress from there in poetic terms. Well, Night Letter provides a conclusive answer. She’s built on her earlier book and explored new territory beyond it. This is poetry that will last.

What makes for a great poetry magazine?

This is the question I was pondering while reading the latest issue of New Walk (Nº8) last night.

First off, there's the role of the editor (Rory Waterman, Nick Everett and Libby Peake in this case). A decent analogy is with a commercial agent. Mediocre ones just offer loads of decent products to the buyer/reader, hoping that one or two might hit the mark. Good ones, meanwhile, help the buyer/reader to focus by following clear personal criteria and making an excellent, subjective pre-selection. This filtering doesn't mean that choice or taste are limited, rather that surprises are positive.

Secondly, I love encountering the combination of fresh work by poets I recognise alongside verse from names I've never seen before. Again, those commercial agents/editors are enabling the buyer/reader to make discoveries. Poetry magazines should feel sparklingly new, an exciting snapshot of the moment, never a two-year-old backlog.

In New Walk 8 there were pieces from Dan Wyke and Fiona Moore. I've previously enjoyed books by both these poets, so it was intriguing to get a hint of where they are heading at the moment.

At the same time, a new name caught my eye, just like Hannah Lowe's verse in The Rialto a few years ago or Stephen Payne's work in an early issue of New Walk. On this occasion, I loved James Davey's two poems. They were packed with textured yet restrained language that was cleverly yoked to its content and narrative drive. I'll be looking out for more of his writing from now on. Now that's what makes for a great poetry magazine!

From remembering to remembrance, Fiona Moore's The Only Reason for Time

At first reading, many of the poems in Fiona Moore's HappenStance pamphlet, The Only Reason for Time, might seem to be about her partner's death several years ago when in his late forties.

However, this collection doesn't explore death or even grief. Instead, it's a life-affirming record of the emergence from grief. By that, I don't mean the shedding of the past or any so-called rebirth. Instead, it's the portrayal of a process whereby the poet moves from remembering to remembrance. It's a treasuring of what has been experienced, enjoyed and suffered, a treasuring that enables us to carry on.

Let's take the example of one poem from the early part of Moore's pamphlet, titled The Shirt. It's full of images that impact on the reader:

"They must have had to work so hard to
save you there was no time to unbutton it.
An office shirt, because that's where
it happened. The thin stripes slashed through -
terrifying, unprecedented - a reminder
of everything I wanted to forget..."

Okay, so the first lines really strike home and are wonderfully written, but the core of this poem follows them - the shirt as reminder and memory. It ends with...

                            "...and from then on,
nothing happened that we would forget."

These days, funerals often seem to be termed "celebrations", as if there were some miraculous short cut through grief. Moore is only too aware that this isn't the case. The Only Reason for Time traces her route out of it, as in the poem On Dunwich Beach. It's ceremonial, like a rite. The protagonist reaches the shore, gets ready and swims. The end of each stanza is a staging post:

"...undressing for you...swimming for you...searching for you...dying for you...breathing for you...living for you."

This poem encapsulates the process that I mentioned earlier on in my post - the emergence from grief. Verse has the capacity to transform, for example, remembering into remembrance, but it can only manage this in the hands of the ablest poets. In The Only Reason for Time, Fiona Moore demonstrates that she is among them. Her collection is a huge achievement.