Poetry review – OKAPI: Rosie Johnston considers Fiona Moore’s book-length poem of eloquent reflection on disorienting personal experience
OKAPI
Fiona Moore
Blue Diode Press (2024)
ISBN 9781915108-23-4
70pp £10.00
Fiona Moore’s The Distal Point (Happenstance) made quite an impression when it was published in 2018. It was shortlisted for the TS Eliot and Seamus Heaney First Collection prizes and was a Poetry Book Society recommendation. It built on two pamphlets, also from Happenstance: The Only Reason for Time (2013) which was a Guardian poetry book of the year and Night Letter (2015) which was shortlisted for the Michael Marks Award for Poetry Pamphlets. Having been an assistant editor at The Rialto, Moore is now a member of Magma’s editorial board and is part of the group currently reviving Poetry in Aldeburgh.
The Distal Point wrapped us in many emotions, principally Moore’s grief after the death of her beloved partner. Her second collection Okapi unites her love of untamed islands and the natural world with a further stage of that grief. For almost two years, while the UK was in pandemic lockdowns, Moore took off to Harris in the Outer Hebrides, (having spent many youthful summers on Eigg in the Inner Hebrides) and she takes us on walks and swims alongside her through that fabulous land and seascape.
Okapi is a single, book-length poem written in a combination of haiku-like triplets and longer pieces that can feel as if they’re mimicking the mix of ripples and bigger waves on the shore. The okapi of the title is a toy Moore had as a girl. Its stripes and shape transfixed her as much as the word itself, and the book’s clever cover combines the animal’s markings with suggestions of dry seaweed flung awry on a sandy beach. So ‘okapi’ combines the wearied natural world with the loss of ‘young and clean’ childhood.
Pin-sharp descriptions of the weather and landscape around her are supported by the ambling continuo of her narrative, moving from those girlhood days via a visit with a boyfriend ‘who didn’t like bad weather’ to the solitary confinement, yet liberation of having the place to herself. What child would not want to return to this?
short-sighted indifferent to most birds
I learnt each flower from eyebright to gentian
cinquefoil to saxifrage to the white half-globes
of grass of parnassus veined with green
and where to hear seal-song
echo up a green gap in the cliffs
with a gale that knocked me over
Is it the call of the place itself, or the peace and pleasures so many years before?
all year the island would be with me
the foghorn’s echo note when the mainland
had gone adrift ceilidhs strip-lit
in the prefab hall or firelit in houses
buttercup daisy blossom and beauty
whose red-gold flanks were sweet with milk and cowpat
Moore is capable of writing John Clare and Robert Macfarlane might envy:
sun and shadow pass over the hillside and away
over and away
turning the pages of a book
each day turns as lightly so fast
soft light on grass a spring so pale
it can’t unlock from winter
black-legged lambs with white kneecaps
are learning quickly to jump
that they can only go so high
maybe a little higher
Moore wonders why it took half a lifetime for her to come back and ‘think myself into / the colourful legginess of oystercatchers / in a feather-lifting breeze’. But grief has led her there as well as nostalgia:
my partner is visiting in dreams again
maybe an isolation syndrome
along with the realisation that if there’s enough
going on in your head
you can make a drama of any household thing
pace around for the oven to reach bread temperature
while watching the weather act on the colours
of sea loch and hills
This is such different grief from “The Embrace” in The Distal Point where, two and a half months after he died, Moore half-dreams that her partner has come into their bedroom while she’s getting ready to go out:
The jersey you were wearing was
greenish
unfamiliar. We hugged and
life began to run again through my veins and bones
heart and head, all
the chemicals of awakening
in one rush.
As a big fan of sea swimming even in coolish weather, I am thrilled to find an outstanding depiction in Okapi of the chilly British swim:
plunging into the sea disentangles the brain
very cold
your body quails again
the shock
intake of breath
ice’s fiery embrace
half-holds you
half-lets go
Again Moore’s grief has changed since The Distal Point where she describes a rather dismal swim in “On Dunwich Beach” and the whole experience is weighted by her late partner’s absence:
Waves rock the pale horizon. I could swim on
until my heart falters and I’m dying for you
but I’d never find you…
…The drab land calls, the sea
spits me out – numb, dripping salt, living for you.
Both The Distal Point and Okapi are saturated in the mutual love that persists after the loved one has died. But on the island, while her heart is still full of her late partner, she is magnificently present in herself. Then, like an electric shock, we’re back in London:
I went down the eleven-hour tunnel of the night
and got off the train to find london (sic)
smeared in oil and soot the air
acrid the sky between rooftops a smudge
left by a greasy finger.
So eloquent, that lower-case ‘london’. But Moore is still a Londoner after all:
The next meeting is about london’s filthy air
the fight to breathe in my own borough
where I’ll have to return soon
easy to have a bad conscience the question is
what to do with it
Having soaked all her senses in the vigours of the Hebrides, how can Moore bear to leave it? Other loyalties come into it of course and she lets us know this, deftly as always, in an elegy for a friend
between slanting walls
of a watery house was it his
tilted at the angle
of luskentyre graveyard
behind the dunes
where a gale
whipped sand in our faces
off the long neat pile
as the minister called out
against its roar and the unseen
breaking waves
the full names of six men
who stepped forward one by one
took hold of three ropes
and let his coffin down
The Blue Diode press in Leith has made a beautiful job of publishing this book which is perfect reading by the warmth of a fire with a good Scotch beside you, or indeed anywhere at any time of year. I’m still shaking its salty breezes from my hair.
Rosie Johnston‘s fifth poetry book Safe Ground is scheduled for publication by Mica Press in March 2025. Four have been published by Lapwing Publications in Belfast, most recently Six-Count Jive in 2019. Her poems have appeared in The Phare, Snakeskin, London Grip, Culture NI, The Honest Ulsterman, Mary Evans Picture Library’s Poems and Pictures blog and Fevers of the Mind. Her poetry is anthologised by Live Canon, Arlen House, OneWorld’s Places of Poetry anthology, Fevers of the Mind and American Writers Review. She reads her poetry widely, most recently at In-Words in Greenwich and the Faversham Literary Festival. www.rosiejohnstonwrites.com
Jan 8 2025
London Grip Poetry Review – Fiona Moore
Poetry review – OKAPI: Rosie Johnston considers Fiona Moore’s book-length poem of eloquent reflection on disorienting personal experience
Fiona Moore’s The Distal Point (Happenstance) made quite an impression when it was published in 2018. It was shortlisted for the TS Eliot and Seamus Heaney First Collection prizes and was a Poetry Book Society recommendation. It built on two pamphlets, also from Happenstance: The Only Reason for Time (2013) which was a Guardian poetry book of the year and Night Letter (2015) which was shortlisted for the Michael Marks Award for Poetry Pamphlets. Having been an assistant editor at The Rialto, Moore is now a member of Magma’s editorial board and is part of the group currently reviving Poetry in Aldeburgh.
The Distal Point wrapped us in many emotions, principally Moore’s grief after the death of her beloved partner. Her second collection Okapi unites her love of untamed islands and the natural world with a further stage of that grief. For almost two years, while the UK was in pandemic lockdowns, Moore took off to Harris in the Outer Hebrides, (having spent many youthful summers on Eigg in the Inner Hebrides) and she takes us on walks and swims alongside her through that fabulous land and seascape.
Okapi is a single, book-length poem written in a combination of haiku-like triplets and longer pieces that can feel as if they’re mimicking the mix of ripples and bigger waves on the shore. The okapi of the title is a toy Moore had as a girl. Its stripes and shape transfixed her as much as the word itself, and the book’s clever cover combines the animal’s markings with suggestions of dry seaweed flung awry on a sandy beach. So ‘okapi’ combines the wearied natural world with the loss of ‘young and clean’ childhood.
Pin-sharp descriptions of the weather and landscape around her are supported by the ambling continuo of her narrative, moving from those girlhood days via a visit with a boyfriend ‘who didn’t like bad weather’ to the solitary confinement, yet liberation of having the place to herself. What child would not want to return to this?
Is it the call of the place itself, or the peace and pleasures so many years before?
Moore is capable of writing John Clare and Robert Macfarlane might envy:
Moore wonders why it took half a lifetime for her to come back and ‘think myself into / the colourful legginess of oystercatchers / in a feather-lifting breeze’. But grief has led her there as well as nostalgia:
This is such different grief from “The Embrace” in The Distal Point where, two and a half months after he died, Moore half-dreams that her partner has come into their bedroom while she’s getting ready to go out:
As a big fan of sea swimming even in coolish weather, I am thrilled to find an outstanding depiction in Okapi of the chilly British swim:
Again Moore’s grief has changed since The Distal Point where she describes a rather dismal swim in “On Dunwich Beach” and the whole experience is weighted by her late partner’s absence:
Both The Distal Point and Okapi are saturated in the mutual love that persists after the loved one has died. But on the island, while her heart is still full of her late partner, she is magnificently present in herself. Then, like an electric shock, we’re back in London:
So eloquent, that lower-case ‘london’. But Moore is still a Londoner after all:
Having soaked all her senses in the vigours of the Hebrides, how can Moore bear to leave it? Other loyalties come into it of course and she lets us know this, deftly as always, in an elegy for a friend
The Blue Diode press in Leith has made a beautiful job of publishing this book which is perfect reading by the warmth of a fire with a good Scotch beside you, or indeed anywhere at any time of year. I’m still shaking its salty breezes from my hair.
Rosie Johnston‘s fifth poetry book Safe Ground is scheduled for publication by Mica Press in March 2025. Four have been published by Lapwing Publications in Belfast, most recently Six-Count Jive in 2019. Her poems have appeared in The Phare, Snakeskin, London Grip, Culture NI, The Honest Ulsterman, Mary Evans Picture Library’s Poems and Pictures blog and Fevers of the Mind. Her poetry is anthologised by Live Canon, Arlen House, OneWorld’s Places of Poetry anthology, Fevers of the Mind and American Writers Review. She reads her poetry widely, most recently at In-Words in Greenwich and the Faversham Literary Festival. www.rosiejohnstonwrites.com