Fury

"It goes back to a subject that has preoccupied Morley for much of his working life, really, which is Romani culture. It’s part of his family inheritance, but he’s also at a distance from it and continually rethinking that relationship. He’s deeply interested in forms of oral telling and the power of speaking voices. He dramatizes, too, the contrasts between lone figures and communal cultural rites. He uses patterns and repetition in the poems to teach us a little Romani. Part of the experience of reading the book is that language-learning. And the use of Romani is a counterpoint to English, suggesting another way of seeing the world. When we first read the book it was still at proof stage, and we found some of the poems transformed in the final copies. Morley had been working intently through the spring lockdown, feeling (he said later) like a lone figure by the gypsy campfire, talking in the dark. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . He split a long pantoum into sonnets that run all the way through the collection. They’re called the ‘Lyrebird’ sonnets, and are inspired by the capacity of lyrebirds to imitate the sounds around them. They’ll imitate the sounds of other birds, or a fire alarm, or a chainsaw. Morley sets up this wonderfully playful, but also ecologically true, concept of these sonnets mimicking each other, and lovers answering each other, and writers picking up echoes of each other. There’s a thick weave of connections that holds the book together. He often takes his methods from wildlife. He studied zoology and specialised in freshwater midgies; he’s an expert in long slow watching of insect behaviour. And this title, Fury . Partly it refers to a poem about Tyson Fury, but Morley talks about his stammer—he has quite a pronounced stammer—as his personal version of the classical Furies. So he’s thought hard about how he could use that stammer to think differently about language; he’ll come up against a word he can’t say, and it will make him think around that word. So when he invokes the furies he is, yes, invoking a sort of Greek terror, but also something that has been creatively enabling for him: being forced to find synonyms, to find another angle. Yes, it becomes so surprising, bringing private patterns of association to the surface. There are wonderful poems about bird’s nests, and comparisons with human structures like wattle and daub. The poetry is its own intricate weave with little tufts of moss tucked in between places. There’s something very made about this book, it’s superbly crafted."