U.K. Poet Kim Moore Wins 2016 Geoffrey Faber Prize

U.K. poet Kim Moore has won the prestigious 2016 Geoffrey Faber memorial prize for her debut poetry collection, The Art of Falling (Seren Books, 2015), reports The Guardian. The book "covers everything from her experiences as a trumpet teacher to her father’s profession as a scaffolder, as well as the suffragettes and a tattoo inspired by Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own," writes Alison Flood. More:

The judges, poets Gillian Clarke and Katharine Towers, and the New Statesman’s Tom Gatti, said that Moore’s poems “accrue force and vigour as they speak to each other across the pages, delivering a thrilling encounter with language at its most irresistible and essential”.

They added: “There is admirable ambition and a generosity that takes in the whole of the world, affirming it all to be worthy of poetry’s invigorating attention. Rarer still, perhaps, is Moore’s command of a poem’s closing moments – she knows when to leave quietly and when to jolt the heart. Few write as well as Moore of the limitations and transformations of the body – its animal nature that speaks to the crow or wolf; its ability to internalise the landscape (to ‘grow a sloping woodland in your heart’); its fragility and ability to attract and absorb pain, to be ‘translated by violence’.”

Moore, who was born in 1981 and worked as a trumpet teacher for 13 years before focusing on poetry, is currently writing a new collection, looking at everyday experiences of sexism...

Read on at The Guardian.