HELEN DUNMORE
COUNTING BACKWARDS
Poems 1975-2017
Winner of the Costa Book of the Year for her final collection, Inside the Wave, Helen Dunmore was as spellbinding a storyteller in her poetry as in her prose. Her haunting narratives draw us into darkness, engaging our fears and hopes in poetry of rare luminosity, nowhere more so than in Inside the Wave, in its exploration of the borderline between the living and the dead – the underworld and the human living world – and the exquisitely intense being of both. All her poetry casts a bright, revealing light on the living world, by land and sea, on love, longing and loss.
Counting Backwards is a retrospective covering ten collections written over four decades, bringing together all the poems she included in her earlier selection, Out of the Blue (2001), with all those from her three later collections, Glad of These Times (2007), The Malarkey (2012) and Inside the Wave (2017), along with a number of earlier poems.
‘Dunmore is a particularly lucid writer, and not simply because her poems are so often filled with the play of light. Her language is bare and clean; her forms balladic and unobtrusive… Dunmore seeks to draw attention, not to her mastery of craft, but to her subject and the intricate, original, patterns of her thought…These poems are light-boned, but strong: elegant, complex, fully-turned unions of image, thought and sound. In these times, we should be glad of this voice.’ – Kate Clanchy, Guardian
‘Dunmore gets a wonderful balance between delicate, exact, surprising language and very strong thought – which may be bitter, sardonic, or violent, tender, or wildly imaginative, but is always generous… A lovely poetic electricity runs through her poems.’ – Sean O’Brien & Ruth Padel, PBS Bulletin
‘She was – first and last – a poet. Her first collection, The Apple Fall, was published when she was 30, her last, Inside the Wave, in April this year… Her last collection is her most spare and moving. Inside the Wave is smooth as a sea pebble and liminal – poised between life and death.’ – Kate Kellaway, in her tribute to Helen Dunmore in The Guardian
Cover painting: Winter sunshine, rush of the stream, Porthmeor (February 2014) by Kurt Jackson
Mixed media www.kurtjackson.com
HELEN DUNMORE
COUNTING BACKWARDS
POEMS 1975-2017
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This edition of Helen Dunmore’s poetry has been expanded from Out of the Blue: Poems 1975-2001 (Bloodaxe Books, 2001) to include all the poems from her three later Bloodaxe collections Inside the Wave (2017), The Malarkey (2012) and Glad of These Times (2007). Out of the Blue was Helen Dunmore’s selection drawing on her earlier Bloodaxe titles Bestiary (1997), Recovering a Body (1994), Short Days, Long Nights: New & Selected Poems (1991), The Raw Garden (1988), The Sea Skater (1986) and The Apple Fall (1983), as well as a new collection, Out of the Blue, and a selection of poems for children previously published in Secrets (Bodley Head, 1994). Fifteen poems which narrowly missed being included in Out of the Blue have been added to this edition; these are marked with asterisks in the contents listing.
Counting Backwards was Helen Dunmore’s original title for Inside the Wave, which was first published in April 2017, with her final poem ‘Hold out your arms’ added to the book’s first reprint with her approval.
CONTENTS
Title Page
Acknowledgements
Inside the Wave (2017)
Counting Backwards
The Underworld
Shutting the Gate
In Praise of the Piano
Re-opening the old mines
Inside the Wave
Odysseus to Elpenor
Plane tree outside Ward 78
The shaft
Leave the door open
My life’s stem was cut
The Bare Leg
The Place of Ordinary Souls
My daughter as Penelope
The Lamplighter
The Halt
Bluebell Hollows
A Loose Curl
Hornsea, 1952
Festival of stone
A Bit of Love
Winter Balcony with Dunnocks
Mimosa
Nightfall in the IKEA Kitchen
The Duration
At the Spit
Terra Incognita
Four cormorants, one swan
Girl in the Blue Pool
February 12th 1994
What shall I do for my sister in the day she shall be spoken for?
In Secret
All the breaths of your life
Her children look for her
Little papoose
Cliffs of Fall
Five Versions from Catullus
1 Through Babel of Nations
2 Undone
3 Sirmio
4 Dedication
5 Sparrow
Rim
On looking through the handle of a cup
Ten Books
Subtraction
My people
September Rain
Hold out your arms
The Malarkey (2012)
The Malarkey
Come Out Now
The Inbox
Boatman
I Owned a Woman Once
Longman English Series
Writ in Water
Dis
Newgate
At Ease
Harbinger
The Hyacinths
The Night Workers
Agapanthus above Porthmeor
Visible and Invisible
The Snowfield
Lemon tree in November
Bildad
Skulking
Basement at Eighteen Folgate Street
Barclays Bank, St Ives
Playing Her Pieces
Pianist, 103,
The Torn Ship
Taken in Shadows
Prince Felipe Prospero (1657-1661)
Picture Messages
Lethe
The Queue’s Essentially
The Captainess of Laundry
The Day’s Umbrellas
The Deciphering
The Tarn
The Gift
What Will You Say
Cloud
I Have Been Thinking of You So Loudly
The Kingdom of the Dead
The Last Heartbeat
The Old Mastery
The Overcoat
Window Cleaners at Ladysmith Road
I Heard You Sing in the Dark
La Recouvrance
The Filament
Glad of These Times (2007)
City lilacs
Crossing the field
Litany
Don’t count John among the dreams
The other side of the sky’s dark room
Convolvulus
The grey lilo
Yellow butterflies
Plume
Odysseus
The blue garden
Violets
The rowan
Barnoon
Getting into the car
Glad of these times
Off-script
‘Indeed we are all made from the dust of stars’
Tulip
Beautiful today the
Dead gull on Porthmeor
Narcissi
Dolphins whistling
Borrowed light
A winter imagination
Athletes
Pneumonia
Wall is the book
Gorse
Blackberries after Michaelmas
To my nine-year-old self
Fallen angel
Bridal
Still life with ironing
Spanish Irish
Cowboys
Below Hungerf
ord Bridge
Ophelia
Winter bonfire
One A.M.
Lemon and stars
Cutting open the lemons
Hearing owls
‘Often they go just before dawn’
May voyage
Out of the Blue (2001)
Out of the Blue
The man on the roof
Giraffes in Hull
Jacob’s drum
That old cinema of memory
Depot
A lorry-load of stuff
Virgin with Two Cardigans
Ice coming
Cyclamen, blood-red
Piers Plowman: The Crucifixion & Harrowing of Hell
Smoke
Bristol Docks
The spill
Without remission
The rain’s coming in
As good as it gets
If only
Mr Lear’s ring
Fortune-teller on Church Road
Sleeveless
The point of not returning
The form
The sentence
With short, harsh breaths
The footfall
The coffin-makers
Inside out
The blessing
FROM Bestiary (1997)
Candle poem
At the Emporium
Next door
He lived next door all his life
Under the leaves *
The surgeon husband
Fishing beyond sunset
Hare in the snow
Need
Sometimes in the rough garden of city spaces
I should like to be buried in a summer forest
The scattering
All the things you are not yet
Ferns on a hospital window*
Diving girl
A pretty shape
Viking cat in the dark
Baby sleep
Frostbite
Basketball player on Pentecost Monday
Tiger lookout
Tiger Moth caterpillar
Hungry Thames
The wasp
On growing a black tulip *
Little Ellie and the timeshare salesman
Bouncing boy
Ghost at noon
Greek beads
Tea at Brandt’s
We are men, not beasts
FROM Recovering a Body (1994)
To Virgil
Three Ways of Recovering a Body
Holiday to Lonely
Poem in a Hotel
The Bike Lane
Drink and the Devil
Ahvenanmaa
Rubbing Down the Horse
You came back to life in its sweetness
Heimat
In the Desert Knowing Nothing
Poem on the Obliteration of 100,000 Iraqi Soldiers
The Yellow Sky
Getting the Strap
Adders
The conception
Scan at 8 weeks
Pedalo
Beetroot Soup
The Diving Reflex
Bathing at Balnacarry
Boys on the Top Board
Sylvette Scrubbing
Babes in the Wood
Cajun
Then I think how the train *
Skips
Time by Accurist
The Silent Man in Waterstones
The Wardrobe Mistress
When You’ve Got
Afterword *
FROM Secrets (1994)
Lemon sole
Christmas caves
That violet-haired lady
Whooper swans
Snow Queen
The cuckoo game
The butcher’s daughter
The greenfield ghost
Herring girl
Russian doll
Breeze of ghosts
FROM Short Days, Long Nights (1991)
Those shady girls
The dream-life of priests
Sisters leaving before the dance
On not writing certain poems
Privacy of rain
Dancing man
At Cabourg II
Baron Hardup
Nearly May Day
Three workmen with blue pails
Brown coal
Safe period
Big barbershop man
The dry well
Our family, swimming again *
Sweet pepper *
Heron
One yellow chicken
Sailing to Cuba
Off the West Pier
Winter 1955
Rinsing
To Betty, swimming
In Berber’s Ice Cream Parlour
On drinking lime juice in September *
Not going to the forest
Lutherans
FROM The Raw Garden (1988)
Code-breaking in the Garden of Eden
Seal run
Wild strawberries
A mortgage on a pear tree
A pæony truss on Sussex place
Permafrost
At Cabourg
Ploughing the roughlands
The land pensions
A dream of wool
New crops
Shadows of my mother against a wall
Air layering
The argument
The peach house
A meditation of the glasshouses
The haunting of Epworth
Preaching at Gwennap
On circuit from Heptonstall Chapel
US 1st Division Airborne Ranger at rest in Honduras
One more for the beautiful table
Lambkin
Dublin 1971
The hard-hearted husband
Malta
Candlemas
Pilgrims
An Irish miner in Staffordshire
FROM The Sea Skater (1986)
The bride’s nights in a strange village
Lazarus *
Christmas roses
I imagine you sent back from Africa
The knight *
In memoriam Cyril Smith 1913-1945
The parachute packers
Porpoise washed up on the beach
In deep water
Lady Macduff and the primroses
Mary Shelley
The plum tree
The air-blue gown
My sad descendants
Patrick at four years old on Bonfire Night
The horse landscape
Thetis
In the tents
Uncle Will’s telegram
Rapunzel
Bewick’s swans *
The sea skater
In the tea house
Florence in permafrost
Missile launcher passing at night
FROM The Apple Fall (1983)
The marshalling yard
A cow here in the June meadow
Zelda
Annunciation off East Street *
The Polish husband
The damson
In Rodmell Garden
The apple fall
Pictures of a Chinese nursery *
Pharaoh’s daughter
Domestic poem
Patrick I
Patrick II
Weaning
Clinic day *
Approaches to winter
The night chemist
St Paul’s
Poem for December 28
Greenham Common
Poem for hidden women
If no revolution come
A safe light
Near Dawlish
The last day of the exhausted month
Second marriages *
The deserted table
The writer’s son
Ollie and Charles at St Andrew’s Park
Winter fairs
In a wood near Turku
Landscape from the Monet Exhibition at Cardiff
Breakfast
INDEX OF T
ITLES AND FIRST LINES
About the Author
Copyright
Inside the Wave
(2017)
for Susan Glickman
Counting Backwards
Untroubled, the anaesthetist
Potters with his cannula
As the waterfall in the ante-room
Grows steadily louder,
All of them are cool with it
And just keep on working
No wonder they wear Wellingtons –
I want to ask them
But it seems stupid, naive,
Even attention-seeking.
Basalt, I think, the rock
Where the white stream leaps.
Imagine living at such volume
Next door to a waterfall,
Stepping in and out of the noise
In their funny clothes.
But you can get used to anything
Like the anaesthetist
Counting to himself
Backwards, all wrong.
The Underworld
And besides, we might play cards:
Those slapdash games you once taught me
Which any fool can remember
Or from the fabric which has been tied
With string, wrapped in brown paper
Put away in the highest cupboard
Since the time the children were young
And everyone’s children were young
I might make new curtains
And hem them all by hand.
I used to be so afraid of failing
To grasp the moment, the undertone,
To look foolish in the eyes of anyone
But now I like the patter of cards
The lazy sandwich that falls open
Halfway to the mouth,
The refills in a thumbed glass
The way people get up, yawn,
Go stiff-legged to the window, wondering
That it isn’t yet tomorrow
It’s a long way from here to the river:
I like to see the fish come in
But the game is still on.
From the way the cards are falling
I’d say you will win.
I used to think it was a narrow road
From here to the underworld
But it’s as broad as the sun.
I say to you: I have more acquaintance
Among the dead than the living
And I am not pretending.
It’s pure fact, like this sandwich
Which hasn’t quite tempted anyone.
Shutting the Gate
A barefoot girl hugs the wall
On tiptoe, her instep
Arched like a cat’s back.
Nearby a car revs.
She looks at me and smiles
Like a primary-school child.
Her friend smokes by the gate
One hand on the wall.