POEM OF THE WEEK

This week’s poem begins with a faint sense of unease – a doubletake at an unsettling sight in the mirror: what is that growing under your chin, under your nails? It then unfolds into a surreal nightmare, slowly gathering momentum right up to its abrupt ending, as if it were the kind of dream from which the reader might jolt awake halfway through, bathed in a cold sweat.

For better or worse, over the past four years “pandemic poetry” has become a popular genre (the same is true in fiction). The best of it – and “Moss” is a fine example – doesn’t read like a belated Covid news dispatch, but instead uses the heightened emotions of that time as a springboard for imaginative, transformative writing, turning a shared experience into something fresh and strange.

“Moss” is one of the stand-out poems in The Day Before, the second collection from Aoife Lyall, a young Irish poet living in the Scottish Highlands.

Tristram Fane Saunders

MOSS

We thought it was pen at first or paint, a dab under the chin, worked under the nails, found

in the folds of elbows, the backs of knees. But no. We have started to moss. We see it everywhere:

the woods, the parks, the playgrounds; parents trying to hide it under hats and gloves, children

picking it off each other like scabs. Some compare colours, trace the lines as islands join to islands

form their soft continents. Advice arrives on the wind like spores use less water, get more sunlight, consider

introducing competitive plants. We steer clear of sulfates, scrub at it in the bath and shower, swap our sheets

for sand and gravel, but still it comes. And soon we start to see whole families covered in the stuff. They move

slowly, erratic, glacial, curl up under slides and seesaws, become benchmarks and bollards, milestones

and street sculptures, until those in charge are forced to admit to the rest of us, all hanging by a thread –

From The Day Before (Bloodaxe, £12)