New British Poetry 23: At Home Away From Home

Earlier this year I was contacted by an author who wanted me to review her book. Now this is a little unusual, but not unprecedented, as most, but not all, review copies come directly from the publishers, as a way of showing their wares. And I must admit that I approach books received directly from their authors with some trepidation. If a publisher sends me something, and I don't like it, I don't have to do anything with it. If a magazine or journal sends me something they want reviewed in their pages, they'll be happy with whatever they get. But without the buffer-zone of relative anonymity that these methods provide - that is, when it's just me left alone to deal with the author - I feel my responsibilities are somewhat altered. That is, while I feel bound to give the author the "answer" s/he has asked for (like it or not), that answer is bound to be a public one. To try and sense what this is like, for author and reviewer, imagine that you've devised a huge new magic trick that I'm about to perform for an audience, even though neither one of us knows whether it will work. Okay, so here goes...

The author of this new work is Deborah Moffatt, and the book is entitled FAR FROM HOME (Belfast: Lapwing, 2004). One of its attractive aspects is its internationalism. Moffatt is an expatriate American, now living in Scotland, and FAR FROM HOME - published in Ulster - demonstrates effectively how fluid one's concept of belonging can be; or rather, Moffatt treats the permeability of spaces (both internal and external) as a virtue to be cultivated. The book's thirty-four poems move easily around the world from North America to Europe, but also between the worlds of imagined time, time past and a present tense just a little way out of reach. One of my favourite pieces, and one which is broadly typical of the book in some respects, is 'Swans on the Road'. Here, as in many of the pieces, regardless of length, there is a sense of foregrounded circularities - in forms, ideas and imagery, as can be seen in this truncation:

There were swans on the road when I woke at dawn,/ A road the swans had mistaken for a river, black water gleaming,/

Or perhaps it wasn't water at all, or a road, but the dark morning sky,/

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