Poet and campaigner Fiona Moore finds joy and celebration alongside loss in fellow ecopoet Helen Moore’s river / run, a collection of long-form poems exploring a living ecology, history and language shared with waterbodies and our fellow animals.
1,930 words: estimated reading time = 7.5 minutes
NB: If reading on a phone, you might want to allow it to rotate the page and read as landscape rather than portrait, to maintain the format for the excerpts from the poems.
If a river is long-form water, then a long poem can run like a river. Ecopoet Helen Moore has written a trilogy of long-form river poems, set in Dorset and north-east Scotland. They explore ecology, history and language, and the plight of Atlantic Salmon. (I’ll follow Moore’s practice of capitalising all living beings.)
But is river ever singular, or is that a superficial, simplistic human concept, foreshadowing exploitation? Here’s what the river networks say in the poem ‘Dorset Waterbodies, a Common / weal’:
Don’t call us ‘river’
as if we were singular -
a blue, serpentine line on a map,
an ‘s’ from source to estuary;
an abstraction
to be navigated, straightened.
fished, dredged.
Opening a book of ecopoetry, even the most ecologically minded reader may think: will I feel preached at? Moore deftly avoids this in the passage above by allowing the water to speak and question our assumptions. The reader may also ask: will dread overcome me, or will there be some joy? river / run contains joy in the energy and diversity of water, its inhabitants and landscapes, alongside the dread and the pain of loss.
Findhorn – northern flow and flight
Joy also comes from the liveliness of the text – the varied, energising forms it takes, and the way description engages all the senses. Moore crafts her poems to embody riverine flow and eddy. The writing has a kinesthetic effect, if that’s the right way to say you feel it’s moving you along (often fast) and around. I found this most effective in the opening poem, ‘Findhorn Bay: Waves of Flow & Flight’. Even on a map this bay, east of Inverness, is an astonishing landscape. The poem begins “Tide pouring into the Bay as if through the neck/ of a wineskin -” and shows the impact:
Incoming waves flowing past boatsheds, The Captain’s Table, houses hunched against north-east winds - down past the Kirk, rippling over sand- & mudflats, brine filling the rough-stitched ‘Gut’ of salt-marsh, swelling it with the wine of Life.
It’s a largely benign flow, but hugely powerful; the poem doesn’t need to remind us explicitly how destructive water can be, as part of the forces we’re letting loose while we fail to address climate emergency.
The wineskin metaphor’s a rarity, all three poems being mostly deep in the ‘real’ world. As well as the movement of tide, rivers and burns, ‘Findhorn Bay’ describes two long journeys and a short one, first the ancient migration of Wild Salmon “sacred to Picts & Celts”, with “Miocene eyes”. Their route is extremely challenging, “from furthest Atlantic… through kelp forests, storms, gyres,” until the “leaps of faith” as they struggle upriver in Scotland. But
For every hundred Salmon that leave our rivers now,
less than five return.
river / run includes photos by David Buckland, one depicting Wild Salmon infested by Sea Lice, spread by fish-farm escapees. It’s painful to look at.
Pink-foot Geese take the second journey, and the poem shifts from the speaker’s viewpoint on ground
& the sky suddenly wrinkled, filled with tremulous lines
as if the weathermen had pencilled in the air-waves,
these marvellous patterns converging on the Bay.
Hairs on my skin rise spontaneously to meet them,
& in my chest, heart is a full crimson sail.
to imagining their summer in the far north and migration route back to Scotland, “following star-maps in their brains”. Apart from the “dragon flare of gas at Sullom Voe” these passages are exhilarating (heart as a sail, another rare, wonderful metaphor) until, arrived at Findhorn,
A dozen Pinkfeet stir,
beating hearts,
lifting, honking....
Pop! Pop! Pop!
Explosions of shots
ring out, shattering the calm -
a slaughter begins. The unexpectedness delivers a jolt. Loosely indented text is shocked into two columns, straight-justified: geese dying on the left, shooters opposite. The anger comes through, and we’ve been flying with the geese and share it.
Most shooters travel
long-distance for ‘action’
they film & boast
on YouTube channels -
600 miles to Findhorn Bay
GREAT SPOT
FOR SPORT - - - - - - -
The narrative turns to the human inhabitants’ perspective, from strongly against to appreciating the income the shooters bring, and the rights (or not) of Nature.
All this is done in three pages with a lot of white space for the reader’s own thoughts. The whole poem is only 12 pages long: rich in descriptive language and packed full of references, yet concise. Its last, short journey is a farm-to-farm route that Findhorn fishwives used to take, trading herring from their creels for cheese, eggs etc. It’s written in short prose paragraphs – a walk, at human speed. “Who are the descendants of these tough women? What tenacity of character, what knowing in their blood?” This idea of instinctive, inherited knowing likens the women to Salmon or Geese. The speaker’s rucksack becomes a creel:
... will a future culture come to honour Nature’s teachers, incise Goose & Salmon in their hearts? In my creel I’m placing all the man-made rubbish. There is no place for it in this cauldron of Life.
Nature and culture – an ecopoetic palimpsest
‘Findhorn Bay’ was written for the Findhorn Bay Arts Festival. The other two poems were commissions from Cape Farewell, centring on Dorset river systems, as part of the RiverRun project “that connects Cape Farewell’s scientific partners with local farmers and artists… [on] the poor state of freshwater”. All three poems are divided into sections with titles, to help the reader follow the structure.
In her introduction, as well as helpful context for each poem, Moore explains her method: an interdisciplinary, collaborative, intuitive approach, with “roots in animistic European traditions”, alongside “gleanings” while out in Nature, engagement with scientists and others, and research into the many aspects of a landscape from geology to social history. She describes how from all this “the writing ferments and emerges as a poetic palimpsest”. When you read the poems, this makes perfect sense – and so it does that, she says, they take a long time to write. Other writers can imagine what the work might involve: choosing which material to use and how, ordering it, editing down and down, touching on themes often just in a short phrase, trusting the reader to do the work and make connections.
‘Dorset Waterbodies’, the middle poem, takes varyingly indented forms, all across the page, to score the rhythm. I particularly liked the sections where other voices speak: the water (see opening quote) and its creatures. In ‘Nightmare slurry spill’, Fish and industrially farmed Cows speak in a loose pantoum, whose semi-repeated lines convey a powerful sense of claustrophobia: the Fish can’t breathe, and “Overcrowded Cows… feet in piss & shit” are unnaturally confined. As a whole, I wasn’t quite as swept along by this poem as by ‘Findhorn Bay’, but that’s by a very high standard. The introductory section, describing a visit to Durdle Door, captures a sense of post-lockdown relief, though empty cruise ships are “squatting the horizon… ticking over” (the filthy bunker fuel, the emissions, the waste!). It celebrates the new tourists’ diversity:
& crowds of colour break
the monotony
of white, rural m o n o c u l t u r e s.
Moore uses spaced-out letters to emphasise a few key words in this poem. I stumbled over these; maybe that’s the intention, but I’m not sure they add to what the form and language already do.
The poem ends with the river (“if you must make us ‘river’”) making the case for human respect and restoration, “the right to self-determine”. The descriptions of river life are beautiful, from Dippers and Dragonflies to Waterweeds to
our single-celled beings
constellate like s t a r s ...
The conclusion might have more impact in performance, perhaps less so on the page, however fervently we agree:
let’s be communities of diverse voices
with a common future.
A communion of subjects & one
Commonweal
This kind of writing is so, so hard to do, even in a riverine voice – which, here, seems to shift a little from river towards human.
Dorset – southern spells and celebration
‘Edge of Wild River’, the third and shortest poem, begins with a dream of a Salmon. Moore explains in the introduction she dreamt it while living in difficult circumstances in Sydney, with the terrible 2019/20 bushfires raging. The Salmon collides with her, “like being struck by a waterlogged pillow”. “What has she to say?”
Apart from the dream, in prose sentences with breaks, this poem is all written in short-lined verses, left-justified. The tone is song-like, spell-like, as if to will a different future into being. In ‘Water Blessing’ voices ask for forgiveness for pollution:
We this grey wreckage
dumped on the bend in spate;
we the old bones of trees,
the breeze, swimmer, floating leaf ...
Human healers are celebrated: the scientists, litter pickers and amateur water testers. Ecologists studying water samples and counting River Shrimps
listen
to sounds from underwater hydrophones -
eerie bubbles, clicks, and echoes
bouncing off the sterile walls -
In a 2022 interview Helen Moore gave to Kathryn Alderman, on the Ink Sweat & Tears website, she was asked if there’s a difference between nature poetry and ecopoetry:
“Ecopoetry for me is all about consciousness. Consciousness of our deep interconnection with our planetary home and of our humanimal nature. Awareness too of the paradigm that has created our disconnection in Western cultures, and the power structures that have a vested interest in maintaining our disempowered state.”
river / run puts these principles into action, but subtly, using the power of description, form and language. ‘Edge of Wild River’ ends with a couplet that sums up the book’s passionate message [poet’s ellipses]:
as we help wild river heal,
so we help and heal ourselves ...
Find more
Helen Moore’s river / run (2024) is published by Cape Farewell Books. Cape Farewell produces opportunities for artists, scientists and communities to work together: “by creating art founded in scientific fact, our projects highlight humanity’s destructive impact on the earth and inspire people to act towards a sustainable cultural shift.” As Fiona explains, two of the book’s poems form part of Cape Farewell’s RiverRun project, which interrogates the environmental impact of the way the Dorset land is farmed, and the impact on the rivers and waters that feed Poole Bay.
You can explore more of Helen’s work at her website — where you can also listen to her reading Findhorn Bay, Waves of Flow & Flight, the poem created for the Findhorn Bay Arts Festival 2018, with a soundtrack by VisionSonic.
Helen Moore is also a member of ClimateCultures and has written posts for us, including The Start of Something Going Wrong, her review of fellow member Joanna Guthrie‘s collection, Her Whereabouts. In The Ghosts of Fleas, her post for the Finding Blake website, she shares and discusses her poem inspired by William Blake’s 1819 painting, ‘The Ghost of a Flea’.
Fiona mentions Helen’s Ink Sweat & Tears interview. You can read that here.
Fiona Moore’s collection, Okapi (2024) is available from Blue Diode Press, and you can find her on Instagram at fionamoore555.
All images from the book, river / run. The final image is a still from a film by ClimateCultures members, Hanien Conradie and Margaret LeJeune. You can read Writing on Water, Hanien’s post discussing the film of her performance in the River Dart and reading Afrikaner poet Eugene Marais’s Diep Rivier.
Fiona Moore
