Kim Moore's The Art of Falling (Seren, 2015)

Some favourite passages:


And the soul, if she is to know herself
must look into the soul and find
what kind of beast is hiding.

the opening stanza of "And the Soul"

I come from people who swear without realising they're swearing.

the opening line of "My People"

                                  ...and the lawn sits

in its shadows and dark and its falsehoods

and the ending begins with its terrible face,

its strange way of being, its short way of living....

from "I'm Thinking of My Father"

and if there was a moment

when I thought the body was a cage,

I knew it then....

*

Here is the loneliness of November

and its failure at an ending....

from "After Work"

Wouldn't any of us, if pushed, sit on the riverbank

and comb snakes from our hair, or think that in our grief

we could become a sea bird, our outstretched bodies

like a cross nailed to the wind?

from "Translation"

                                                     You ask

about birds, but all I can talk of is stones.

end of "How I Abandoned My Body to His Keeping"

                                                     Show me

how to recognise the glint in the eye of the dog,

the rabid dog. Remind me, O body, of the way

he moved when he drank, that dangerous silence.

Let me feel how I let my eyes drop, birds falling

from a sky, how my heart was a field, and there

was a dog, loose in the field, it was worrying

the sheep, they were running and then 

they were still. O body, let me remember

what it was to have a field in my chest....

from "Body, Remember"

...when I knew fear was just a thing

to be bargained with, inside my feathered heart

was another feathered thing, born white but slowly

turning black, the way the crow in all the stories

was turned black for speaking truth.

end of "When I Was a Thing with Feathers"

In winter, in the fog,

sheep lie on the road for warmth

until the car is close enough

to breathe on them

and then they straighten their legs

and clatter away like coat hangers.

from "The Dead Tree"

                                 ...his eyes two leaves

of slowly changing colour.

end of "Chet Baker"

I can put on the heavy garments of the soul.

I can tether myself to the earth if I choose.

from "Give Me a Childhood"

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