'Wrest, wrest from this restless life some rest,
Still the ceaseless chatter in the head …'
Since I can remember I have always heard voices in my head. Over
the years jumbled thoughts, fired by sometimes overwhelming feelings,
have jostled
with fragments
from poets and playwrights. Recently, stumbling by chance on ‘The Making
of a Poem’ by Mark Strand and Eavan Boland, I began listening more
intently to those voices, tried to express what they are telling me. Sometimes
my voices
come out as sonnets, sometimes villanelles, sometimes lyrics.
These poems are efforts to understand a chequered past, embrace a vivid
present, prepare for an uncertain (or certain) future. The 'voices in
my head' speak of
loving and hiding from love, of stripping away the self-protective layers,
of ageing and confronting death, of words and meaning, of sadness and
joy.
‘
How I grew from child to man’s a history
I cannot trace, only blindly re-create.'
Terence Moore was brought up in Horsham by an aunt who ran a home
for boys with Downs Syndrome. After working two years as a miner,
he read
English
at Trinity
College, Cambridge. Upon graduating he became an apprentice bookbinder
then taught English to speakers of other languages at Baroness Wangenheim’s school
in Oxford. In his thirties he read linguistics for a Ph.D. at the University
of California, Los Angeles, where the focus at the time was on Chomsky’s
ideas on an innate universal grammar. He stayed on as an Assistant Professor
of Linguistics, finally moving back to England, first to the University
of Essex, then to the Department of Linguistics, Cambridge. He is a Fellow
of
Clare College.
These days, when not writing poetry he works on John Locke and has published
a number of 'conversations' with Locke on language, truth and meaning.
Black Apollo Press
Germinal Productions