...
...And the sound I had mistaken for your beating heart/
The beating wings of the swans rising from the road/ Flying off before the gathering storm./
Another one of the author's notable style features is her predilection for something which is often called ballad-logic - the appearance of characters, voices, perspectives, or their disappearance in a manner for which the reader is wholly unprepared. Motives, turns of phrase, allusions and so forth simply emerge, or are thrust forward, without warning, and the result is both invigorating (as it stimulates thought) even as it is occasionally baffling. One of the most compact examples of this - and in my view, one of the most touching poems in the collection, is 'Fair Haired Boy', reproduced here in its entirety:
Watch yourself out there, my dear, with your fair hair/ And translucent eyes and skin white as a shroud,/ A ghost of the child you once were, my love,/ All the flesh and blood and bone of you gone,/ Only the spirit left to roam, and no one left/ Who knows how to speak to the dead./
As pleasing as these elegiac lines are, one cannot be certain of the identities of the speaker, the 'boy', their relationship, or the actual state being described. Yet how apt are the words, and what a loss would be entailed by a more explicit set of details.
Moffatt is certainly a talented writer, with more than twenty years' worth of publications by highly reputable firms. And FAR FROM HOME itself shows the degree of confidence that only such a track record sponsors. The voice here is confident even in experiment, and manages to avoid sentimentality and typicality altogether in its cosmopolitan musings. It is a very grown-up book of experiences and will suit readers who are willing to engage just as fully with poems which express emotional complexities in a manner that doesn't wholly confess itself at first reading.
FAR FROM HOME (ISBN 1 898472 80 7) is available from www.amazon.co.uk.
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