Paperback, 90pp, 8.5x5.5ins
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Helen Moore not only has her own distinctive voice, she has also marked out her own territory, a territory at once local and universal. You could say she has globalised the local or rather localised the global, for her concern is nothing less than our mental and physical sanity, our survival in a dark time.
Moore is neither naïve or simplistic. Hers is a sophisticated red/green world view. The ecocidal tendencies bringing about climate change, with its dire consequences for humanity, are not presented or represented in an abstract or noisy way but contextualised as the willed or stupid acts of our official and unofficial rulers.
Her poems speak out of the whirlwind, from the depths of her being. They are the laments and keenings of a true makar, speaking to the hearts and minds of those who will listen and then act, before it is too late. She deploys all the registers and possibilities inherent in poetic language — enjambement, meter, rhyme, diction, metaphor — to generate what George Oppen called the "lyric valuables". As it happens, this great American poet admired the work of one of Moore's few predecessors, Jonathan Griffin, and he would have surely admired Helen Moore.
In a poem about India, Moore concludes — "When rains sweep the world away, / we know how to live on the edge". These are poems from the edge, the only vantage point Helen Moore acknowledges.
…the lights go out across the globe / as all the earth respires. / We wait quietly, now very much at home; / breathing in the silence, our faces glow.
This troubling and troubled book is instinct with life. 'Poetry and hope are one', writes Yves Bonnefoy. Helen Moore — keep on writing poems, keep hope alive!" —Anthony Rudolf
"Like the vision it preserves and celebrates, the language of this collection draws its strength from a deep rootedness in the natural world. At once eulogist for all that sustains our life and elegist for all that we despoil, Helen Moore emerges in Hedge Fund as an urgent, compelling and compassionate voice for these critical times." —Lindsay Clarke
"Helen Moore's poems offer a prism to our disquiet about the natural world. Their spectrum encompasses the residual grief of John Clare for the landscape he saw already lost after enclosure, and relishes the hedgerow as an incidentally subversive, liminal space thriving between marked-out areas of greed and ownership.
With these poems Moore prods us to our responsibilities, lifts a voice to the act of keeping watch for escalating silences and losses. Her poems are tender, sane, political, born of love, and persuade us that poetry can drive a vital empathy into the fabric of a fragile bio-sphere." —Sean Borodale
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