Cyngor Llyfrau Cymru
All the Men I Never Married
All the Men I Never Married
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Disgrifiad Cymraeg / Welsh Description
Ail gasgliad o gerddi hirddisgwyliedig Kim Moore. Mae'r awdur yn portreadu'r amrywiaeth a geir o fewn perthynas gwŷr a gwragedd, yn hyblyg ac yn amwys, yn dreisgar ac yn dyner, yn gymhleth ac yn angerddol.
Disgrifiad Saesneg / English Description
All The Men I Never Married is the highly anticipated second collection by Kim Moore. The author portrays relationships with a passionate realism that encompasses complicity and ambiguity, violence and tenderness, and an understanding of the layers of complexity and complicity that exist between men and women.
Manylion y cynnyrch / Product details
- ISBN 13
- 9781781726419
- Gwales Code
- gwales.com.9781781726419
- Gwerthwr / Vendor
- Cyngor Llyfrau Cymru
- Long Title
- All the Men I Never Married
- Awdur / Author
- Moore, Kim
- Current Price ex VAT
- £9.99
- Current Price inc VAT
- £9.99
- Availability Status (EN)
- Available
- Availability Status (CY)
- Ar gael
- Dyddiad cyhoeddi / Publication Date
- 2021-10-08
- Cyhoeddwr / Publisher
- Seren
- Media Type (EN)
- Paperback / softback
- Media Type (CY)
- Clawr meddal
- Pages
- 72 pages
- Size
- 138 × 216 mm; depth 10 mm
- Language Code
- English
- Categori / Category
- CY: Barddoniaeth (yn Saesneg) | EN: Poetry (in English)
- Is-gategori / Subcategory
- CY: Beirdd Unigol (yn Saesneg) | EN: Individual Poets (in English)
Bywgraffiad yr Awdur / Author Biography
Kim Moore's debut collection The Art of Falling won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize in 2016. She also won a New Writing North Award in 2014, an Eric Gregory Award in 2011 and the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize in 2012. She judged the National Poetry Competition and the Forward prizes in 2020. She has a doctorate from Manchester Metropolitan University in Poetry and Everyday Sexism and is co-director of the Kendal Poetry Festival.
Adolygiad y Cyhoeddwr / Publisher Review
Following her prize-winning publications, If We Could Speak Like Wolves and The Art of Falling , this poetic sequence charts Kim Moore’s experience of encounters with the opposite sex. For a female reader there are shocks and recognition both of situations and of reactions; for male readers perhaps some re-appraisal. The poem which precedes the sequence, ‘We are coming…’, is both a threat and a promise that women are escaping the ‘narrow places’ and traditional limitations, but they still drag ‘the snare and the wire behind us’. In the main sequence, Moore frequently addresses that drag of fear and false guilt. She recognises that women can help to build cages for girls, police themselves, and are always asking if they let in or provoked abuse. The first poem of the sequence is a catalogue, and sometimes we can relate individuals to specific later poems, but it also seems to be a way of letting go of the memories as Moore concludes ‘this is watching you all disappear’. The poems are intricate, technically accomplished and powerfully personal. Some are affectionate tributes to men – her music teacher, the gentle soul who talked to and distracted the fox-hounds, the sweet trumpeter of poem number 28, or the ex-lover of number 41. Many express the tensions and conflicts of desiring what you also fear and remembering both the passion and the pain. A large proportion are about fear – of rape, of physical violence and its after effects, and of the threat behind various levels of sexist behaviour – which stalks so many women in their daily lives. The sonnet sequence (number 31) exposes the activity of a deep faker but is woven like a spell against participants at any level. The damage done by a violent, abusive relationship may taint other innocent contacts and transform one into ‘a stone pretending to be a woman’. In one of the later poems, Moore asks if, now she has ‘said the word’, her true, wild nature will return, but the repeated image of the trapped bird (brilliantly explored in the mirror poem number 47) does not suggest that the catharsis is complete. She wittily takes to task male critics and tutors she has encountered, especially in the last poem: ‘He told me this was women’s business, / That the world was not interested in such things.’ Women are half the world, and Moore’s poems are telling both halves that women’s experience is as real, significant and worthy of expression as men’s – and that men need to understand it.
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