Okapi by Fiona Moore

Fiona Moore asks “am I really here/ in gaelic they say in an island not on it” and, as readers, we might begin preparing ourselves for an immersive experience. Okapi is a single, book-length poem, set mostly on (in!) a Hebridean island during the pandemic. Moore’s rich descriptions recreate the island as a living protagonist: the subject of reflection, memory, destruction, loss (symbolised by the rare okapi, a favourite animal in her childhood zoo), beauty and resilience, a meeting point of substance and dream:

        is it possible to be in the real island and the dream island
        at the same time
              to inhabit the real as if in that haze
              or inhabit the haze as if real

“The calm yet faceted language of Moore’s luscious music spectacularly recovers the joys of landscape. I enjoyed the authority of the voice in service of the natural world and its precarity. A moving and exciting sequence of poetry.” —Daljit Nagra