Fiona Moore has published two pamphlets with HappenStance, both long sold out.
At last here is a debut book-length collection, in which she confronts personal loss and irretrievable change, as well as wider, more public themes—recent European history and the politics of power. To such concerns she brings creativity, humour and intelligence. Her poems emerge from huge pressure like diamonds.
The Distal Point was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation for Autumn 2018, and shortlisted for the T.S.Eliot Prize.
The Shirt
I didn’t find it for months, your shirt
bundled into a corner of the airing cupboard.
I shook it out. It had been cut
with long cuts all the way up the sleeves
and up the front, so it looked like a plan
of something about to be put together.
They must have had to work so fast 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.
I’d washed it afterwards, not knowing what to do
with it, or that in three weeks the same thing
would happen to another shirt, a favourite,
dull cotton whose thick weave made it look
as if all the pink shell-grains of sand
had come together on one beach,
a shirt for a gentle hug; and from then on
nothing happened that we would forget.