Article
Tsead Bruinja on the British poet’s ‘mercilessly tender’ writing
If we could speak like Kim Moore
December 03, 2015
In her daily life, Moore is a music teacher and a trumpet player. This trumpet is featured regularly in The Art of Falling, for example when she comically curses her students ‘who tap the mouthpiece / with the heel of their hand to make a popping sound’ or ‘who drop the trumpet on the floor then laugh’. As far as Moore is concerned, ‘let them play / in concerts each weekend which involve marching / and outdoors and coldness’ and ‘let them be plagued with the urge to practice / every day without improvement’.
You would expect a poet with such a musical background to reflect about it in her work, and with Moore, this is certainly the case. Her sentences are smooth, and when she uses repetition it never becomes a monotonous list. She writes passionately and honestly about ‘her people’, ‘who swear without realising they’re swearing’ and ‘the ones on the pickets shouting scab and throwing bricks at policemen’. Moore’s captivating poetry is mercilessly tender.
Kim Moore lives in Barrow, Cumbria, England. When you walk down her street, you can see the ocean between the houses. She is the daughter of a scaffolder from Leicester. She was born there in 1981 and inherited a beautiful ‘common’ working class accent from her parents. When she says ‘water’, you hear ‘wha’uhr’. Many teachers tried to get her to unlearn this accent, thankfully to no avail. I got to know Moore in Fermoy, County Cork, Ireland, and was immensely impressed by the poems she read from her chapbook If We Could Speak Like Wolves.
Her first full-length collection The art of falling (Seren, 2015) has just been published, which, like her chapbook, features lots of wolves. These wolves cry out loud throughout her poems, for example when she writes about a violent period in her life: ‘And in that year my body was a pillar of smoke / and even his hands could not hold me. / . . . / And in that year my tongue spoke the language / of insects and not even my father knew me’. But please do not ask Moore about the meaning of her wolves. She prefers to leave that a mystery for both herself and her readers.In her daily life, Moore is a music teacher and a trumpet player. This trumpet is featured regularly in The Art of Falling, for example when she comically curses her students ‘who tap the mouthpiece / with the heel of their hand to make a popping sound’ or ‘who drop the trumpet on the floor then laugh’. As far as Moore is concerned, ‘let them play / in concerts each weekend which involve marching / and outdoors and coldness’ and ‘let them be plagued with the urge to practice / every day without improvement’.
You would expect a poet with such a musical background to reflect about it in her work, and with Moore, this is certainly the case. Her sentences are smooth, and when she uses repetition it never becomes a monotonous list. She writes passionately and honestly about ‘her people’, ‘who swear without realising they’re swearing’ and ‘the ones on the pickets shouting scab and throwing bricks at policemen’. Moore’s captivating poetry is mercilessly tender.
© Tsead Bruinja
Translator: Regina Szwed dos Santos
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