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.

Book preview

HELEN DUNMORE

THE MALARKEY

Poetry Book Society Recommendation

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

‘This traffic between the everyday and mortality requires a perfect control of tone, neither sententious nor sentimental in this familiar setting… In its uninsistent but authoritative way, The Malarkey is a condition-of-England book, driven by a concern for those who have little purchase on their own lives… The Malarkey is Helen Dunmore’s best collection, the work of a grown-up for grown-ups who will remember what in the nature of things they’ve had to lose and what nevertheless they seek to celebrate’ – Sean O’Brien, Guardian

COVER PAINTING

:

Odilon Redon: Flower Clouds (c. 1903)

Pastel, with touches of stumping, incising, and brushwork, on blue-gray wove paper with multi-coloured fibres altered to tan, perimeter mounted to cardboard, 445 x 542 mm; through prior bequest of Mr & Mrs Martin A. Ryerson Collection, 1990.165, The Art Institute of Chicago.

HELEN DUNMORE

The Malarkey

…the most beautiful thing on this dark earth…

SAPPHO

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Acknowledgements are due to the editors of the following publications where some of these poems first appeared: The Guardian, The Independent, London Magazine, Poetry Ireland Review and Poetry Review. ‘The Malarkey’ won first prize in the National Poetry Competition in 2010.

‘I Owned a Woman Once’ was commissioned by Arts Council England’s website for the 2007 Bicentenary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act. ‘Writ in Water’ and ‘Taken in Shadows’ were first broadcast on BBC Radio 4, and ‘La Recouvrance’ was