Jane Routh reviews Okapi by Fiona Moore (Blue Diode Press, 2024)
Okapi
was my best word my favourite creature
her graceful stripey oddness went with her name
I said it and said it
playing with my plastic zoo putting her
alongside leopard zebra lion giraffe
whose bright patterns on the carpet’s worn savannah
made the world that began to age at my birth
bright too was my grandparents’ lawn
thick with miniature flowers from which sprang
between each mowing
daisies I picked for chains
stroking their petals tipped with the cochineal
granny mixed into her apple snow
Fiona Moore’s early pamphlets and The Distal Point (a P.B.S. recommendation) gave us some memorable poems. For Okapi, her second book, she switches – as the cover blurb puts it – to “a single book-length poem set mostly […] in a Hebridean Island during the pandemic”. And, as I’d have anticipated, she can write wonderful lines about sea and its landscapes:
on the walk back salt-haired and euphoric
how harebells glow in the machair
how oxeye daisies and meadowsweet
and dark round seedheads of knapweed
how the new moon startles over the hill’s edge
the evening star a hang-glider
swung above its canopy
Yet what is most interesting about Okapi is its form. This is a long poem – over fifty pages. It eschews punctuation. And also capital letters (with one exception, to which I’ll return later). But as well as lineation, it does retain stanzas, using asterisks between groups of them to mark a shift of form and idea. You might, for example, open to a page of three-line stanzas followed, after an asterisk, by two nine-liners. I think of these stanza groupings as ‘poem-units’: in many ways they read like independent poems of scenes or encounters which are complete in themselves, but which are incorporated as building blocks for the whole.
On my first reading, I didn’t actually notice rows of three asterisks. These divide the poem almost invisibly into five main sections, the first of which is of childhood memories. The poem’s title and first word is ‘okapi’
my best word my favourite creature
her graceful stripey oddness went with her name
I said it and said it
playing with my plastic zoo
A couple of asterisks (poem-units) later, much the greater part of what is remembered from childhood is idyllic holidays to Eigg in the Inner Hebrides:
by day and in dreams that island
lay in seas that could take all colours of the rainbow
beyond it unrolled a frieze of mountains
steep as fairy castles
on the far side were there
more islands pale shadows floating
out of a blue-gold haze
Although there are strong pieces here (such as “did we nearly drown”), I think a reader always has to be a little patient with others’ childhood memories. Their function within the long poem is to establish how deeply embedded are the interests and values of early life (“all year the island would be with me”) which the poem expands on as it shifts into the present tense and lockdown in the Outer Hebrides – initially on the west side of Harris where, “when there’s a swell too rough to swim / I walk along the atlantic shore / ears full of thunder”.
She can write wonderful lines about sea and its landscapes
By autumn, Fiona Moore has moved across to the east side of Harris facing the Minch, “from [w]here the world curves away / a stony coastline deeply indented / by sea lochs scattered with islets”. These are all landscapes I know well and take great pleasure in how they’re rendered here, not just in lyric descriptions – but for brief nods to dune conservation or social history, or the list poem-unit of seven three-liners given over to translating the Gaelic names of local lochs:
loch of the small tree
fank loch
loch of the red-throated diver who may still nest there
inlet or heel loch
loch of the narrows
road loch
loch of sorrow or the axle tree or possibly the haystack
long-backed loch
grey fank loch
What else is there to do in lockdown besides translate names on the map? “My partner is visiting in dreams again / maybe an isolation syndrome / along with the realisation that if there’s enough / going on in your head / you can make a drama of any household thing” she writes, while watching news from beyond “the sea loch’s bright slash” and naming “small domestic hatreds” or gazing at a photo and then looking back to “once upon a time”. These backward glances the poem tracks are various – once again to childhood and Eigg; to working life with a cabinet office meeting; to a team away day; to her granny; to her schooldays and the reflection of “how could we in that classroom have known / life speeds us up” which the poem then spins out into wider climate questions:
how to train the mind to stay afloat
above the epochs on the scale of galaxies
aware that the remarkable
green era that nurtured us
won’t last forever anyway
would this take me beyond the dark
The poem approaches a climax of despair here with:
we are all prey we are eating each other we have
eaten our young rather than change our lives
and at this point it returns briefly to the image of the childhood toy which opened the poem: “will even zoos save my okapi / her striped hindquarters mimicking slats of light”. But we are in Harris, remember, where the land can still offer succour from such climate nightmares because “plunging into the sea disentangles the brain / very cold” or “lichen calms the heart it doesn’t move”. The poem briefly journeys south “down the eleven-hour tunnel of the night / […] to find london / smeared in oil and soot” before it winters in the Hebrides with more fine writings about the short dark days and ferocious winds – interspersed with the occasional pithy gem of a haiku-poem-unit:
a box of 80
teabags shouldn’t go this fast
or is it the days
As the weather begins to soften, we’re also offered a comparison with “another island far away” where “spring starts in winter” as well as a brief trip to an “outpost” – though, after overwintering so well in Harris, for both of these places I did need the endnotes to know where I was (Greek Evia, then St. Kilda). Here, the poem’s energy seems to have dissipated somewhat, before it builds an ending to dream for her late partner and close with what opened the poem: the child’s okapi and the flowers on her grandparents’ lawn.
What is most interesting about Okapi is its form. This is a long poem – over fifty pages
You’ll see that Atlantic and London lost their capitals in quotations above – the text is completely consistent in its use of lower case. The effect of this seems to be to avoid prioritising any part of the text; all of it is of equal status, all of it flows along. The one word which retains its cap is “I”. (A lower case “i” always does look odd.) This seems to reinforce the sense that the poem is internal narrative, the reader eavesdropping on the poet’s thinking.
Without the usual small signposts to guide you, Okapi doesn’t make for an easy read. You might want to turn back to compare something you recall earlier – but how do you find it? (It’s not easy to review either: where on earth was that quotation I need to check …). I do admire this wonderfully adventurous way of handling all that writing from the lockdown years, yet here I am talking about ‘poem-units’ … obviously stuck with feeling I want titles and spaces and my own choices about moving around the book. And a final note about the cover. I don’t know how well this will reproduce on screen but at first glance you could see a dead or burnt tree against a desert landscape. Upside-down it looks a bit more like what it is, a photograph of dry seaweed on sand (which is curiously reticulated). Is it cleverly made to represent both a failed landscape for the okapi as well as a Hebridean beach? Or am I reading too much into this?
Jane Routh has published four poetry collections and a prose book, Falling into Place (about rural north Lancashire) with Smith|Doorstop. Circumnavigation (2002) was shortlisted for the Forward prize for Best First Collection, Teach Yourself Mapmaking (2006) was a Poetry Book Society recommendation and she has won the Cardiff International and the Strokestown International Poetry Competitions. Listening to the Night was published by Smith|Doorstop in 2018. A pamphlet, After, was published by Wayleave Press in 2021. Her latest collection is The Luck (Smith|Doorstop, 2024).
‘Okapi’ is from Okapi by Fiona Moore (Blue Diode Press, 2024) – thanks to Fiona Moore and Blue Diode Press for letting us publish it.
