A Language Of Insects: The Art Of Falling By Kim Moore

Capturing the essence of Kim Moore's assured debut, The Art of Falling, is writing in water. She is elusive. And she telepaths emotion without any sense of a transference. There is some genius in a poetics which connects the reader to a well of introspection without a direct conduit.

The received effect is remarkable and is most clear in the kinds of poem, and there are many here, which express a fragility in detachment. 'Followed' describes a snowbound occlusion where helpless inertia...

'The traffic lights flashed
red/amber/green and every bus
brought shuddering to its knees.'

...dislocates and endangers a delicate emotional fabric of connection. Remarkable, because the reader finds themself drawn towards a narcotic and near-visual silence which is lachrymal in its intensity. The urge to cry flows down some cosmic antennae fixed to no coordinate beyond the unexpected sadness of words.

And the feeling has less to do with meaning than inference; Moore organises words in such a way as to yield atmosphere rather than interpretation. Perhaps we should not be surprised to find this in a poet who deals in abstractions: striving to find markers, her narrator gives methodical regulation to the physical accoutrements and idiosyncrasies of habit. A relationship in 'Your Hands' is recalled through locators - 'filters in their plastic sleeves / or delicate papers spread like wings' - but not in conversations. The 'Shouting' of rage is remembered as if 'from some distant shore'; it remains for the poet to fill the void with words, and she proceeds in a silence which is acknowledged as often as she strategises the idea of repetition in an ironic effort to countermand it.

Moore's poems amount, often, to catechisms, repeated mantras trying desperately to control equivocation, to understand, to get a grip on sometimes palpable, sometimes insubstantial wolves of memory. It is interesting that we are urged to look for something beyond the inventories of extraneous suggestion as though her subjects, themes, were intangibles, given prismatic depth only in squeezed revelatory drips.

We are drip-fed emotional pain through a kind of withholding of the material catalyst: starving her audience of the three-dimensions of a human cause, Moore inhabits the vacuum with her own mantras of anxiety, like an aphasic replacing lost nouns with an efflorescence of adjectives. And the received effect is ingenious and persuasive, literally so in 'Your Name', which recounts the febrile narrator's inability to nominate the cause of her pain - 'the shame and blame and frame of it'. Later in an 'Encounter' which is, characteristically, not an encounter, but rather a testament to the power of imaginative recall to shape and re-shape the past, Moore's protagonist holds the remembered, possibly compound, image of (an)'other' in view in order to unify a memory which is as insubstantial as the dust of a moth's wings, as though it had 'never been there at all and all that was left / of you was a taste of smoke in the air.'

Uncertainty, in Moore's ironic grip, is natural to the expression of the thematically offside: the strange, the inexplicably violent, and the unexpected. 'The Messiah, St Bees Priory' describes, in a series of self-contained sestets, a choral rendering of Handel on a winter's day whose snow muffles memory, but cannot blindside the events of 2 June, 2010, when Derrick Bird killed twelve people in a shooting frenzy in the towns and villages of west Cumbria.

Moore's deft organisation of the poem begins and ends in a Priory where the cold's bitterness draws people into a protective circle like a wagon train. The effort of will required to 'forget that afternoon' in a chorus of 'Hallelujas', is overwhelmed by the contrast, and the gunman, who remains hidden behind the horror, is adumbrated in metaphors of anonymous foreboding: 'when the sun / was a hand on the backs of their necks, / when villages, hardly talked about before / were the names on everybody's lips.'

Figures - I say figures because it better defines anonymity - are often invisible behind the flying boots of recrimination and emotional outburst, as though they are too painful, or intransigent, to contemplate. That the reader is encouraged to draw their own inference as to character is a central motif here. And not always depressingly. 'In Praise of Arguing' is an hilarious celebration of the knee-jerk kinetics of falling out, which hides the relationship's protagonists amongst the airborne appliances, in a house that can no longer 'cope':

'And the doors flung
themselves into the street
and flounced away
and the washing gathered
in corners and sulked.'

In fact, emotional tectonics - the falling and rising of great arcs of descent and aspiration - create parabolas of mood that come close to yielding a definition of Moore's major concerns here. Where her narrator is not immersing herself directly in the apex and nadir of personal experience, she is the eloquent succubus who drains vicarious emotional charge through the suffusion of histor(ies). The joyfully plausible arc of the eponymous poet's curious, wilful and sometimes destructive creativity is caught at a clatter in the explosive 'Shelley', whilst the neatly divided sestets of 'John Lennon' hymn another form of outrageous wilfulness, whose satisfaction ultimately demanded a form of deracination. The boy 'who was born without brakes' -

' dreamt each night of climbing
in a plane above Liverpool, circling higher
and higher until the city disappeared from view.'

Elsewhere, the brief and deeply affecting 'Wallace Hartley' captures the singular stoicism of the bandleader who went down with the Titanic, through a conflation of images - cinematic, documented - which enable the turning of the emotional antennae noted earlier, towards a 'sky full of flares and stars' of the imagination whose shimmering brightness is about to be extinguished as the 'immense and black' hull disappears beneath the waves.

Control in Moore's fine volume amounts to an art form. The intractability of her material demands attention to structural considerations and the broad sections she employs here underwrite a skill for subtle organisation which, in turn, only half-disguises a tendency to describe intuitions through observation of detail.

The assertion of 'self' into the maelstrom of conflicting moods and tones here is at once strident, conditional and reflective. Where she is not serving a directly political agenda - 'Mr Gove' is a lyrically persuasive 'open letter' to the former Secretary of State for Education on what encouraging creativity means during a period of cuts to the Arts in schools, whilst the resonantly haunting 'Suffragette' re-imagines the bravery of the early protestors in the form of catechistic couplets - Moore's narrative drive may be as unexpected as a knife between the shoulder blades.

Tonal ascents and descents are needles which swing, sometimes shockingly, from pole to pole. 'How I Abandoned My Body to His Keeping' is conceived in dark, unrelenting metaphors and counter-intuitive images of birds which cannot provide comfort against the darkness of an abused trust. The suggestion of a rape in 'stop, please stop' and the profoundly moving, self-lacerating final stanzas, are preceded by a genuinely frightening line which sums the nature of fear-inertia and makes an irony of the idea of 'ownership' in the poem's title: 'If I asked / him to leave he would smile.'

At the other end of Moore's emotional spectrum lies 'Falling' which cleverly reverses conventional poetic approaches to expressions of love by investing the room in which the loved figure has a near catastrophic fall, with anthropomorphic life. Framed amongst the bathroom furniture 'standing guard' over the prostrate figure, the poem is an affirmation of life, love and thankfulness in crisis. And it contains the most metaphorically-persuasive description of a stunned, presumably epileptic, victim that I have ever read:

'your eyes rolling, wild as a horse, your body
an empty house abandoned to the wind and rain.
When I lift your head, there's no resistance.
It moves like water at the bottom of a tilted bowl.'

It is unusual to find a glossary of a poet's titular theme included in a book, but Moore gives a fine freeform rendition of the variations of 'descent' in her poem 'The Art of Falling', whose psalm-like exposition describes the literal and figurative meanings of falling in metaphors of emotional contraction and recovery. An alkali to the acid of a life's sometime retrogression - 'not falling apart at the sound / of your name' - the poem finds something approaching hope in the wisdom of acceptance.

Moore's identification, here, of 'the correct way to fall / loose-limbed and floppy', casts a possibly unwitting nod in the direction of Alf Bridge, Mancunian climbing pioneer of the 1930s, and deviser of a technique for falling off rock faces relatively safely. And in amongst speculative images of climbers landing, unscathed, on all fours, lies a grander figure for the art of survival, which is, in the end, Kim Moore's poetic mandate.

The Art of Falling is published by Seren