There Is a Tall Sky Above Us
In the poems of Moors’ debut collection ‘There is a tall sky above us’, a rather peculiar ‘I’ communicates ongoing amazement about a rather peculiar world. Men are important within this world, men who are constantly coming and going. In ‘the white shagging rabbits’, the cycle at the heart of the volume, Moors convincingly shows that the sexual urge is omnipresent and all-consuming, revealing man’s inner beast. As a result, some might say the collection harbours a good dose of Sex and the City within its pages, but this comparison is inaccurate. Moors’ humour is actually quite bitter and there are no witty one-liners. More often than not, humour stems from the absurd nature of the situation or the disruptive gaze of the observer; small, everyday scenes are taken apart by the eye and screwed back together again. There is a constant menace at work, and so the simple act of cutting a cake at a garden party can seem as violent as the shower scene in Psycho.
With these poems Moors proves that she masters the methodology of seduction and rejection. This is an extremely accurate and haunting collection of poems.Jury Report Herman de Coninck Prize
These somewhat sadomasochistic poems in a way resemble Expressionist paintings. While they sometimes look quite jumpy, Moors’ work shows evidence of a strong sense of composition, both in content and in form. Undoubtedly this strong compositional aspect and the equally strong, provocative nature of her work are partly why these poems have already been deemed classics of the twenty-first century and Moors one of the rising stars of Flemish poetry.
