fodder for highwaymen

With 'fodder for highwaymen', former Poet Laureate Els Moors has penned a spirited collection in which she explores human motivators: desire, love, fear, loss and our longing for freedom. She examines the complex relationship between men and women, while at the same time challenging our tendency to impose patriarchal and/or binary frameworks on reality. Death is also a key theme in this collection: both as a state of fulfilment that promises complete freedom and surrender; and as something which, although fundamental to the human condition, we would nevertheless prefer to keep at arm’s length.

Using seemingly everyday words, and avoiding poetic pretension, Moors constructs an intriguing whole. The poems are each straightforward in their own right, yet at the same time form interconnections that reveal shifts in meaning. Moors avoids capital letters and punctuation, creating a sense of haste and urgency through the repeated, deliberate use of caesuras mid-sentence. All of this lends her poetic language great flexibility and an evocative power – capturing both the beautiful and the sordid – in keeping with the contrarian logic of her swirling senses.