Catherine Moore's Bog Body Poetry

For Day 29 of the Cruelest Poetry Month, Catherine Moore promotes her collection Borrowings of the Shan Van Vocht. —Gerald So

Slip into a warm wool sweater, settle in, as real-life tales roll off the moors like whispered fog. In Catherine Moore’s collection of prose poems, the ‘borrowings’ in Borrowings of the Shan Van Vocht are Bog Bodies—naturally preserved corpses— displayed sometimes like sideshow curiosities in museums worldwide. These mummified bodies are titled after the bog where they're exhumed. In creating a lyrical voice for these nameless, the poet keeps in mind what modern-day forensics reveals about the nature of life and death for these bodies recovered from the bogs—the what of their diets, the ways their occupations or illnesses marked their bodies, and the how behind their death.

Bog Body Murmurs

In the encyclopedia of ends we are named for the bog, melting and churning, that exhumes us. Our stories within the tarn are tale-less. We are the many lesses— breathless, ceaseless, eyeless, fruitless, garbless, merciless, noiseless, ribless, shadowless, useless. Our only study is the wet. Only loss is the sun’s grope overhead. We become gourds of gurgled mud with murmurs that only nudge the insides of moors. When we rise, will they say corpse or say body? It matters not. Our spade-cut skin never heals, cadavers being the braille of death.


Borremose Women

He spent his hours pretending to cut peat. Digging at the same spot. A memorial to her in pitch, mud, and wind. It wasn’t the right spot though. I watched him looking out at the horizon each dusk, his boots interned where he thought she lay, and their dead child in a jar. I let him select his own grave site. If she thought she could birth the nyfødte on the bog where they met, I let her. Squat, sweat, and pant that August night. When she cried for birth, she was close to death. This was planned. The soil cooperated. When she disappeared he sentineled like a Danish Mastiff. I knew the first blizzard would not stop him. I knew by spring thaw the soil would suck him. I rehearsed the crack of his skull. I dreamt the growl in his strangled throat. It all happened in a blind of black and snow— flurry, fury, and fear. Ja, I did. I didn’t expect the bog to take me too.


Lindow Woman

I caught a murderer because his wife refused to rise. She stayed in hearth coomb, unharmed, vegetal mind. I crawled where the kesh water cheeps and lisps. Expelled his confession long due from this ruminant tarn, before my second burial.


Stidsholt Woman

He wouldn’t want me to return. That is why I roamed. Why I burrowed in every available hole. I moved about in the wan hours when Olaf’s sight lines were shortened. His men were in drinks. Some are not right for the place we are born. Some are not rightly placed where they’re brought. My blood and brood fought our way to the table served. I was no lady. This I was reminded of each honeymoon evening, in spats, with an ugly look about him. Swollen to the size of an ox. My battle-burst tongue spoke too passionately. My skull throat resisted his grip. A cunner and vixen I was called. With my sharp ears I overheard whore, raving mad, and they said I would howl myself to death. Olaf knew my will was strong, strong enough to draw the hunger back to one's body, as a draugar risen from the grave in wisps of smoke or foxfire plume pushed through solid stone. Still, a soul cannot survive without a body. On the 30th day Olaf removed my ring and veil, and rushed me. My headless body fell to its knees, sank into the ground where he had been standing. In the end I was not immune to his weapons. The good men, fools and minstrels, stood by, turned their eyes at the sword. Olaf ordered them to bury my head in the bog, burn the body, and dump those ashes in the sea. No resting place, no possible self- exhumation. He wouldn’t want me to return, carrying my hideous head, mouth agaped, hair tarned reddish as fox brush, eyes blackened to onyx, covering the short distance between mine moor and his howe.

You will want more than candlelight when you read this collection.


Excerpted poems from Borrowings of the Shan Van Vocht by Catherine Moore

ISBN:978-1-950730-27-8. Poems within this collection were nominated for The Pushcart and The Best of the Net literary awards. Available through your favorite indie book shop: https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781950730278. Also available in E-book on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Smashwords. Audio book coming soon.