1st December, 2017

Friday Poem – ‘Followed’, Kim Moore

We are still taking in the news that Kim Moore has won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize for The Art of Falling – so we couldn’t help but feature one of Kim’s poems on the blog today. ‘Followed’ is one of the deeply personal central poems which explore an experience of domestic violence.

Kim Moore, in the opening poems of her lively debut poetry collection, sets herself firmly in the North amongst ‘My People’: ‘who swear without knowing they are swearing… scaffolders and plasterers and shoemakers and carers’. The poet’s voice is direct, rhythmic, compelling. The lives of others also feature throughout, and revolve around a quietly devastating central sequence, ‘How I abandoned My Body To His Keeping’: the story of a woman embroiled in a relationship marked by coercion and violence. ‘Followed’ is taken from this darkly personal sequence, and shows a snapshot, a glimpse, of a figure – ‘everything black/ about him’ – who weighs heavy on the speaker, drawing her into shadowy places.
The judges for the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, poets Gillian Clarke and Katharine Towers, and the New Statesman’s Tom Gatti, said that Moore’s poems “accrue force and vigour as they speak to each other across the pages, delivering a thrilling encounter with language at its most irresistible and essential”.

The Art of Falling is available from the Seren website: £9.99

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