ISBN: 1915108233 9781915108234

Category: Poetry / General

Page count: 70

<p>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:  </p><p><br></p><p>    is it possible to be in the real island and the dream island</p><p>    at the same time</p><p>       to inhabit the real as if in that haze</p><p>       or inhabit the haze as if real</p><p><br></p><p>“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</p><p><br></p><p>From a review of Fiona Moore’s debut collection, The Distal Point:</p><p>“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</p>