Fiona Moore’s work has appeared in a variety of magazines, and she blogs at displacement-poetry.blogspot.co.uk. Several years ago, her partner died in his late forties. Some of these poems respond to that death with electrifying elegance, grappling with meaning on the edge of annihilation. Loss is at the heart of existence, but so is love — the two are, in the end, indivisible. This is her first collection.
The Only Reason For Time was selected by Adam Newey in The Guardian writing about the best poetry of 2013. What more is there to say? You have to read this one!
Regrettably, it is currently sold out.
Sample poem:
The Shirt
I didn’t find it for months, your shirt
bundled into a corner in 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.
