The Art of Falling

When I made starting to read contemporary poetry one of my ‘reading goals' for this year, this was exactly what I was hoping to find. Reading this collection was a tremendous experience from start to finish. I read it slowly, a poem at a time, taking the time to re-read lines over and over to get the full experience, and still I did not want it to end. I'll be coming back to these very soon, I believe.

Moore is a poet from my local area. Indeed, I discovered from recommendations from friends who have seen her live readings, including one who is a poet herself and is lucky enough to have Moore as a friend and mentor. The wonderful sense of place of many of Moore's poems blew me away. Is it possible to feel homesick for place I am currently living in right now and actually most of the time feel desperate to escape from? Somehow, Moore managed to bring up these emotions in me, particularly in the first of the three sections. The poems in this section touched on themes of family, growing up working class, and of the local area and its sense of home. Here are a few of my favourites from this first section:
- ‘A Psalm for the Scaffolders' is a wonderful celebration of the workers and scaffolders, like the speaker's father. I love the feeling of movement and space and height that the poem's form allows.
- I clearly remember the subject of ‘The Messiah, St. Bees Priory', the Cumbrian shootings of 2010. I honestly got chills at the moment, halfway through my first read of the poem, when I realised the poem's subject, remembering that time, “when villages, hardly talked about before / were the names on everybody's lips.“
- I loved the personification of a house in the poem ‘In Praise of Arguing', the chaos and again the movement that Moore seems to do so well.
- ‘Barrow to Sheffield' a poem recounting a train journey, the character of the land and this area.

The second section recounts an abusive relationship, nearly chronologically, from the earlier poems seemingly written in the moment, to later in the section where the speaker is reminiscing and trying to make sense of the past. I ended this section in tears; it was exceedingly powerful and emotionally overwhelming. Here is an example of just one moment that really shook me, of which there were many, from ‘Your Name' on p.41:

Because they tried to make me say your name, the shame and blame and frame of it, the dirty little game of it, the dark and distantheart of it, the cannot be a part of it, the bringing back the taste of it till I was changedinside the flame of it, the cut and slap and shutof it, the rut and fuck and muck of it,the not-forgotten hurt of it, the syllablestop-dead of it, the starting in the throat of it,the ending at the teeth of it.