"The Distal Point" by Fiona Moore (Happenstance, 2018)

Poems from Magma, Poetry London, Stand, The Compass Magazine, Poetry Review, Rialto, etc. It was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize (see the Readers' Notes) and it's a PBS Recommendation! There are poems from her earlier well-received pamphlets, Night letter and The only reason for time. You'd better buy the book before, like its predecessors, it sells out. My write-ups of the pamphlets mention the binaries they deal with (Night/Day, Death/Life) and the mediating agencies (moon, dreams, waking up, ghosts). They're here too, though I won't repeat the descriptions.

I had to look up the meaning of this book's title. In anatomy it's the furthest point from the point of attachment. There are several poems about private and public grief. Thematically there's much about might-have-beens - keepsakes (both objects and memories) and symbols (shared and private); what changes, what is remembered and what to let go.

The first section deals (I'm presuming) with more personal issues, ending with the title poem, which uses the geological meaning of "distal", the narrator at the end of a shingle spit - "We stand at the point of greatest change ... No-one will stand here again" - which leads to a section where issues are more worldly and political, though there's room also to contemplate bullocks, striped timetables and plug-holes. The final section is more miscellaneous, returning to some older themes and adding some new ones.

I'll deal with just one poem this time, and a few tendencies. Here's an extract from "Fine Autumn Morning" by Seferis - "Has anyone thought of telling a mountain's fortune as you read the palm of a hand? Has anyone thought of it? ... O that insistent thought shut up in an empty box, wilfully beating the cardboard without pause all night long like a mouse gnawing the floor". In this book's poem "that insistent thought", a river reflects onto the white ceilings of a home, readable like a palm. Its smell invades the house. The house might be like Seferis' box, though it's more like Plato's cave. In the attic there's a mouse. It's captured, put in a cardboard box which is left on the quay. In the night the mouse manages to "act out the mind that concentrates on one thing". By morning there's a hole in the box, in the side pointing to the water. What happened to the mouse? Maybe it "stopped on the edge of something immense" - perhaps life (which rivers often symbolise) but it could well be death - the only escape?

Final lines tend to underline their finality - "soaring towards/ destruction; the higher the more complete", "even/ the expected, the moment of death, must be a shock", "stopped/ on the edge of something immense", "one day you/ could become space debris too", "their finishing line", "at the end of the world as we know it", etc

Line-breaks still puzzle me. When I was wondering whether "The Numbers" needs its first stanza, I wondered what the line-breaks added - if nothing, then aren't they just padding? Poems like "The Cell at Plötzensee" convey factual information, making the piece feel like part of an essay, a feeling compounded by the vocabulary and sentence structure, yet it's broken into tidy triplets. "The Tower" is a bit that way too. Some poems are structured like a summarised debate, with arguments and counter-arguments - "In the middle of a discussion about brexit" (actually about how Wall's Neapolitan ice-cream was made) and "Waking up in a basement" (about what raises awareness of one's death). Again I wondered what the line-breaks did.

Forms

There are many though few are standard.

• "On Dunwich Beach" has 6 couplets, each ending with "for you"
• "Palace of culture" has stanzas of line-length 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Three of the stanzas end with "in the realm of the angel of death", the 2 other stanzas end with a variation of that phrase
• "Hunger" is stanza-palindromic (i.e. first stanza = final stanza, etc)
• "Taking visitors to Auschwitz" is line-palindromic
• In "Quake", "nothing + nothing is an answer" occurs 4 times
• 9 of the lines in "Loukanikos" end in "Loukanikos", half of the rest rhyme with "its"
• In "The rose, the stars" each 9-lines stanza begins with an italicised sentence fragment whose words are recombined to form the final sentence.
• "To the moon" is in 3-lined stanzas with syllable count 10/4/10.

Other reviews

• Emma Lee (This collection is split into three sections “Overwinter”, “Exclave” and “The Rose, the Stars”. The first builds a portrait of love and bereavement, mostly by exploring memories [...] The second section concerns itself with boundaries, particularly leaving a comfort zone [...] The third section feels the most contemporary)
• John Field (Moore’s is a rare gift. We occasionally encounter artists, gatekeepers, 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.)
• Ian Brinton (Fiona Moore’s convincing understanding of the power of immediacy can be felt in both ‘Taking Visitors to Auschwitz’ and ‘After Five Years’. In the former she opens with a clarity of statement which seems to offer superficial realisation but which acts as a mask for much deeper moral understanding)
• Noel Williams (For all the seriousness of its subjects and intent, I found the central section the least engaging. The poems feel motivated more by intellectual dismay at human self-destruction than closely felt personal experience)
• Pam Thompson (‘Overwinter’, the first section of Fiona Moore’s debut collection The Distal Point, features the illness and death of a partner – a loss that permeates the whole but here is especially resonant in poems that recall time, place and occasion; the second, ‘Exclave’ opens out into the world of politics and foreign affairs, including further examples of Moore’s dexterity with form. The third section, ‘The Rose, The Stars’, which presents, if not an acceptance of loss, a repositioning of grief in relation to self and place.Clothes contain emotional weight.)