Inside the Wave: COSTA BOOK OF THE YEAR 2017

By Helen Dunmore

COSTA BOOK OF THE YEAR 2017

Winner of the 2017 Costa Poetry Award.

To be alive is to be inside the wave, always travelling until it breaks and is gone. These poems are concerned with the borderline between the living and the dead – the underworld and the human living world – and the exquisitely intense being of both. They possess a spare, eloquent lyricism as they explore the bliss and anguish of the voyage.

Inside the Wave, Helen Dunmore's tenth and final book of poetry, followed The Malarkey (2012), whose title-poem won the National Poetry Competition. Her other books include Glad of These Times (2007), and Out of the Blue: Poems 1975-2001 (2001), a comprehensive selection drawing on seven previous collections.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Release date: May 31, 2017
• ISBN: 9781780373591

Helen Dunmore

HELEN DUNMORE is a novelist, short story writer and poet. She has written twenty-two children’s books, including Brother Brother, Sister Sister; The Lilac Tree; The Seal Cove; and the bestselling Ingo series. She has written nine adult books including A Spell of Winter, which won the 1996 Orange Prize for Fiction. Her poetry collections have won the Poetry Society’s Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize and the Signal Poetry Award. Helen Dunmore was born in Yorkshire, England, and now lives in Bristol with her husband and children.

Book preview

HELEN DUNMORE

INSIDE THE WAVE

To be alive is to be inside the wave, always travelling until it breaks and is gone. These poems are concerned with the borderline between the living and the dead – the underworld and the human living world – and the exquisitely intense being of both. They possess a spare, eloquent lyricism as they explore the bliss and anguish of the voyage.

Inside the Wave is Helen Dunmore’s tenth and final poetry book, her first since The Malarkey (2012), whose title-poem won the National Poetry Competition. Her other books include Glad of These Times (2007) and Out of the Blue: Poems 1975-2001 (2001).

Cover photograph by Helen Dunmore

HELEN DUNMORE

Inside the Wave

for Susan Glickman

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Acknowledgements are due to the editors of the following publications and websites where some of these poems first appeared: Acumen, The Guardian, Hwaet! 20 Years of Ledbury Poetry Festival, ed. Mark Fisher (Bloodaxe Books/Ledbury Poetry Festival, 2016), London Magazine, 1914: Poetry Remembers, ed. Carol Ann Duffy (Faber & Faber, 2014), 100 Prized Poems: twenty-five years of the Forward Books, ed. William Sieghart (Faber & Faber, 2016), and The Poetry Review.

Several of the poems were broadcast on The Verb (BBC Radio 3). ‘Hold out your arms’ was published in The Guardian and read on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row.

CONTENTS

Title page

Dedication

Acknowledgements

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

1Through Babel of Nations

2Undone

3Sirmio

4Dedication

5Sparrow

Rim

On looking

Reviews for Inside the Wave

[pdcread · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

One of the ultimate things that surfers seek is to ride inside the tube, this tunnel of water is a transitory and for surfers an almost religious experience that only lasts a few seconds in most cases. It is a place that some surfers feel most alive in, but it can be lethal too. Helen Dunmore looks at this transient line between life and death with her poems in this, her tenth and sadly final, poetry book.

In this moving collection that has themes on water, the voyage of mortality and elements of the ancient Greek classics. There are some poems that I really liked, the Lamplighter, Bluebell Hollows and Festival of Stone in particular. Hold out your arms is a poem that has been added to this collection and was written just before she passed away. As with all poetry collections, there are some in here that did nothing for me. That is the nature of poetry, each reader gets something different from the verse. Will definitely give some of her other collections a read though.