The Malarkey

By Helen Dunmore

The malarkey is over in the back of the car… As soon as you turn your back, time slips. The humdrum present has become the precious, irrecoverable past. The ways in which the present longs for the past, questions it, tries to get in touch with it and stretches the power of memory to its limits, are central to this new collection by Helen Dunmore. Joseph Severn recalls Keats hurling a bad dinner out onto the steps of the Piazza di Spagna; the glamour of John Donne's portrait 'taken in shadows' seduces a new generation; the dead assert their right to walk through the imaginations of the living… These are poems and stories of loss and extraordinary rediscovery. The Malarkey is Helen Dunmore's first poetry book since Glad of These Times (2007) and Out of the Blue: Poems 1975-2001 (2001), a comprehensive selection drawing on seven previous collections. It brings together poems of great lyricism, feeling and artistry. 'What is wonderful is the unusual way her steadiness as a writer serves as a foil to the mysterious. She prefers to show, not tell…The passing of time is crucial in this collection and especially its most violent trick of making years disappear in a moment…a collection filled with extraordinary, incorporeal moments and with vanishing acts…The personal poems are superb and anything but self-indulgent' -Kate Kellaway, Observer 'Her latest collection is a clear-eyed, sometimes funny, sometimes sad, meditation on time past and people lost…a superbly structured collection in which poems echo and answer each other' -Suzi Feay, Independent on Sunday

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Release date: Jun 28, 2012
• ISBN: 9781780370491

Helen Dunmore

Helen Dunmore was an award-winning novelist, poet and children's writer, who will be remembered for the wisdom, lyricism, compassion and immersive beauty of her writing. In her lifetime, she published eight collections of poetry, many novels for both adults and children, and two collections of short stories. She won the Orange Prize for Fiction with her novel A Spell of Winter, and her novel The Siege was shortlisted for the Orange Prize and the Whitbread Prize for Fiction.

Reviews for The Malarkey

[si-876194 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Helen Dunmore's first poetry collection since 2007. If there's a theme running though these poems, and two prose pieces (about poets John Donne & John Keats), it would be lost time, the realization of how important a moment, a person, was only afterwards. The title poem has someone searching for their car in a car park, missing the noise their children once made, which had became their way of locating the car.Most of these poems are brief and intense, but there is also humour in poems like 'The Captainess of Laundry' and observational pieces on ladybirds or people seen from a basement or outside a bank. Helen Dunmore has won numerous awards for both her poetry and her many novels. Prolific writer; remarkable talent.