Bloodaxe Books (Hexham). 2019. Pbk. 432 pages. £14.99.
It is lodged in my mind as the most poignant reading I ever heard: Neil Astley of Bloodaxe Books at the Ledbury Poetry Festival in 2017 reading the last poem by his recently deceased author, Helen Dunmore. That poem, ‘Hold out your arms’, is a posthumous coda to Dunmore’s last collection, Inside the Wave completed shortly before her death. Counting Backwards is a retrospect covering ten collections by Dunmore, including all of her three most recent and a selection from earlier work. As the title suggests, in this book the poet’s end is the beginning and it is hard to read the poems in this large volume outside the framework of Dunmore’s death and her last spare and moving work.
Dunmore was a fine and prolific novelist and children’s writer as well as a successful poet, her poetry accolades including a shortlisting for the T.S. Eliot prize in 1997, the National Poetry Competition in 2010 and, posthumously, Costa Book of the Year. Her verse is unshowy, pellucid, focused on real objects in the world with the urgency and sharpness of someone who is about to lose them: ‘I saw what no one has seen: / My cup-handle of a world, / My pinhole morning’. Held between life and death, it is also liminal, poetry of the margins, of seashores, of the night, of the interface between nature and the human.
Dunmore lives for the moment and in glorious colour. The cover of this book is a shimmering painting of winter sunshine at Porthmear. She loves wild landscape but is very far from romanticising it. Instead, she sees it as profoundly human made and subject to change. She hopes her poems do not hanker back to a ‘prelapsarian state of grace’ but rather celebrate resilience and adaptability. A host of flowers find their way into these poems. They are evoked in all their lovely particularity and in their mutability – or mortality, to humanise them – such as the tulips which ‘swagger’ in their exposure to the sun which ‘knows, as you don’t, that it can’t last long’. The connection is explicit in some of the last poems, like the exquisite ‘my life’s stem was cut’ which ends: ‘I know I am dying / but why not keep / as long as I can / flowering / from my cut stem?’
John Keats is the epitome of poets dying before their time, in his case at twenty-five. In the prose poem ‘Writ in Water’, Dunmore has his companion Severn recount the last hours of the one who has become a ‘plaster saint’. Dunmore writes with great realism and simplicity of the dying, ‘her’ people, as she says: ‘I am of their company / And they are mine. / We wake in the wan hour / Between three and four, / Listen to the rain / And consider our painkillers’. In ‘The Underworld’ the poet revises her vision of the journey to death, no longer the narrow road she thought but ‘as broad as the sun’, inevitable and natural since, as she says, ‘I have more acquaintances / Among the dead than the living’.
Though not untimely by Keats’s standards, Dunmore’s death was still premature. Looking at her dates, it is a memento mori to find that Dunmore was born in the same year as myself. Like her in ‘Glad of these times’ I may have thought ours a lucky generation: ‘I am not hungry, I do not curtsey, / I lock my door with my own key… / glad of polio inoculations / glad of twenty types of yoghurt’. Yet in the current corona dominated times, we can take nothing for granted. We are all reminded horribly of our mortality and the fragility of all we love.
Kathryn Southworth is the former Vice Principal of Newman University College, Birmingham. She now lives in London. Her poetry collection Someone was Here was published by Indigo Dreams in 2018 and a pamphlet Wavelengths, co-authored with Belinda Singleton, was published by Dempsey and Windle in 2019.