In That Year KIM MOORE discusses poetry as a medium for talking about intimate partner violence

I’ve never written about that year, except in poetry, where I can hide things in the white space, in the silence.

My first collection The Art of Falling (Seren, 2015) contains a poem called ‘In That Year’. I use a series of images. A body as a pillar of smoke. A tongue that spoke only the language of insects. A year of my life stretched out like a path that I chose to walk, a path that makes its own way through my mind still, looping and re-looping. A series of images as hiding places, as the only place that truth can be found.

Shortly after the book was published, the actor Sam Heughan (one of the stars of the show Outlander) tweeted a picture of ‘In That Year’ simply saying ‘Love this’. The poem experienced a rush of fame as his fans reshared it and speculated as to why he loved that particular poem. The most common theory seemed to be that the poem was about depression, so the actor must have gone through this himself. Nobody linked the poem to domestic violence. I thought I’d be angry at this misunderstanding or even disappointed, but I wasn’t. It felt strangely like freedom to watch the poem floating away from me on a cloud of theories — finally distanced from the pain and events that caused it to be written.

Cathy Caruth argues that the impact of trauma is in its ‘refusal to be simply located, in its insistent appearance outside the boundaries of any single place or time’. The truth of the aftermath of domestic violence is that it exists always, that I carry it with me, that I can both send myself back to that year deliberately but also find myself there by mistake. There is, as Caruth describes it, a ‘breach in the mind’s experience of time’ and I can always be taken by surprise.

I thought that by putting some of the things I remembered about that year in a poem, the breach would be contained. It has a frame. It has borders. It cannot escape. And yet one of the strengths of the lyric poem is that it pulls the past into the present, creating a lyric moment which happens again and again and again. I realise now that both of these things can be true – that year is both contained by the poem and given permission to exist once again.

(I think I can promise to say nothing here that is not true.) All the Men I Never Married No. 2 Many years ago, I lived in a house in the woods.

The woodcutter visited on nights when the moon hid itself between the clouds. Sometimes I go back to watch it happen again, slip inside the body of the woodcutter, to feel what it felt like to be him. His arms and legs are heavier than mine. The cigarettes on his heart, his lungs, his chest. His finger to his lips, biting the nail to the quick.

51 POETRY WALES