Out of the Blue Read online

  HELEN DUNMORE

  OUT OF THE BLUE

  ‘An electrifying and original talent, a writer whose style is characterised by a lyrical, dreamy intensity’ – GUARDIAN

  A celebrated winner of fiction’s Orange Prize, Helen Dunmore is as spellbinding a storyteller in her poetry as in her novels. As in her fiction, these haunting narratives draw us into darkness, engaging our fears and hopes in poetry of rare luminosity. Her poems also cast a bright, revealing light on the living world, by land and sea, on love, longing and loss.

  Out of the Blue presents a comprehensive selection from her seven previous books of poetry. It also includes a collection of completely new poems remarkable for their sensuous magic, sharp delicacy and sureness of touch.

  ‘One of this country’s finest literary talents’ – DAILY TELEGRAPH

  ‘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

  ‘This is a poet whose words can be savoured on the tongue’ – IAIN CRICHTON SMITH, Glasgow Herald

  ‘At once intimate and strange…Celebrations mingle with apprehensions throughout this volume, which in a sense lights candles for the human journey, its homecomings, its departures, its comforts, its finalities. These are statements of faith as well as recognitions of our double nature, our fears and weaknesses’ – PETER PEGNALL, London Magazine

  COVER PICTURE

  On Botallack Head, 6pm, 24.4.99, strong sun and westerly winds by Kurt Jackson

  (THE GREAT ATLANTIC MAP WORKS GALLERY)

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Acknowledgements

  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 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 The Apple Fall (1983)

  The marshalling yard

  A cow here in the June meadow

  Zelda

  The Polish husband

  The damson

  In Rodmell Garden

  The apple fall

  Pharaoh’s daughter

  Domestic poem

  Patrick I

  Patrick II

  Weaning

  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

  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

  FROM The Sea Skater (1986)

  The bride’s nights in a strange village

  Christmas roses

  I imagine you sent back from Africa

  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

  The sea skater

  In the tea house

  Florence in permafrost

  Missile launcher passing at night

  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 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

  Heron

  One yellow chicken

  Sailing to Cuba

  Off the West Pier

  Winter 1955

  Rinsing

  To Betty, swimming

  In Berber’s Ice Cream Parlour

  Not going to the forest

  Lutherans

  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

  Babe
s in the Wood

  Cajun

  Skips

  Time by Accurist

  The Silent Man in Waterstones

  The Wardrobe Mistress

  When You’ve Got

  FROM Bestiary (1997)

  Epigraph

  Candle poem

  At the Emporium

  Next door

  He lived next door all his life

  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

  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

  Little Ellie and the timeshare salesman

  Bouncing boy

  Ghost at noon

  Greek beads

  Tea at Brandt’s

  We are men, not beasts

  INDEX OF TITLES AND FIRST LINES

  Copyright

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  This book includes all the poems which Helen Dunmore wishes to keep in print from her previous Bloodaxe collections The Apple Fall (1983), The Sea Skater (1986), The Raw Garden (1988), Short Days, Long Nights: New & Selected Poems (1991), Recovering a Body (1994) and Bestiary (1997), together with a new collection, Out of the Blue (2001), and a selection of poems for children previously published in Secrets (Bodley Head, 1994).

  Acknowledgements are due to the editors of the following publications in which some of the previously uncollected poems in the Out of the Blue section first appeared: The Guardian, The Independent, Poetry Review, The Printer’s Devil, Proof, Wading through the Deep Water (Coychurch Press, 2000). ‘Jacob’s Drum’ and ‘Mr Lear’s Ring’ were first broadcast on Poetry Proms on BBC Radio 3. ‘Ice Coming’ was commissioned for the Salisbury Festival. ‘Piers Plowman: The Crucifixion and Harrowing of Hell’ was commissioned and broadcast by BBC Radio 3.

  OUT OF THE BLUE

  (2001)

  Out of the Blue

  Speak to me in the only language

  I understand, help me to see

  as you saw the enemy plane

  pounce on you out of the sun:

  one flash, cockling metal. Done.

  Done for, they said, as he spun earthward

  to the broad chalk bosom of England.

  Done for and done.

  You are the pilot of this poem,

  you speaks its language, thumbs-up

  to the tall dome of June.

  Even when you long to bail out

  you’ll stay with the crate.

  Done for, they said, as his leather jacket

  whipped through the branches.

  Done for and done.

  Where are we going and why so happy?

  We ride the sky and the blue,

  we are thumbs up, both of us

  even though you are the owner

  of that long-gone morning,

  and I only write the poem.

  You own that long-gone morning.

  Solo, the machine-gun stitched you.

  One flash did for you.

  Your boots hit the ground

  ploughing a fresh white scar in the downland.

  They knew before they got to him,

  from the way he was lying

  done for, undone.

  But where are we going?

  You come to me out of the blue

  strolling the springy downland

  done for, thumbs up, oil on your hands.

  The man on the roof

  When my grandmother died my father eulogised her.

  There she was, coming home with the pram

  and her crowd of children

  when something strange in the light

  or its impediment getting at her from heaven

  made her look up to see one of her children –

  her eldest child, her son, him –

  up on the roof, riding the horse of the homestead

  with wild heels, daring her to defy him

  and get him down. She got him down

  with a word, as he remembers it,

  her lovely penny-pale face looking up at his

  from the path where her children swarmed and shouted

  and it was this

  he remembered when her coffin lay under his hands:

  the roof, and his coming down.

  When our priest died I remembered him

  up on the roof, mending a tile

  – a little job on hand, and a hammer

  and air of busyness to keep him busy

  while he pretended not to be pretending

  to ride the roof in its wild beauty

  over the unfamilied air of Liscannor

  and half-way to America. Maybe.

  Or maybe merely tapping the tile in

  like a good workman.

  ‘How beautiful it was up on the roof,’

  he said to the people at Mass.

  My father touched his mother’s coffin

  and did not say how golden her hair was.

  Even I remember how golden it was

  when the grey knot was undone.

  Now they are gone into the ground,

  both of them. They are riding on the roof,

  their wild heels daring us to defy them,

  and we are here on the ground

  penny-pale and gaping.

  They will not tell

  how beautiful it is. I will not ask them.

  Giraffes in Hull

  Walking at all angles

  to where the sky ends,

  wantons with crane-yellow necks

  and scarlet legs

  stepping eastward, big eyes

  supping the horizon.

  Watch them as they go, the giraffes

  breast-high to heaven,

  herding the clouds.

  Only Hull has enough sky for them.

  Jacob’s drum

  This is Jacob’s drum

  how he beats on it how he fights on it

  how he splits every crack of the house

  how he booms

  how he slams

  hair wet-feathered sweat gathering

  red-face Jacob throwing his money down

  all on the drum his one number

  beating repeating

  O Jacob

  don’t let go of it

  don’t let anyone take your drum

  don’t let anyone of all of them

  who want you to be drumless

  beating your song on nothing

  Jacob they’d do it

  believe them

  it’s time they say

  to put your drum away

  do you remember the glow-worm Jacob?

  how we looked and nearly touched it

  but you didn’t want to hurt it?

  I thought it was electric

  some trash a child dropped

  some flake of neon

  stuck to a rock

  don’t put your finger on the light

  you said and I stood still then

  glow-worm Jacob remember it

  I had the word but it was you

  who told me it was living

  and now I say to anyone

  don’t touch Jacob’s drum

  That old cinema of memory

  O that old cinema of memory

  with the same films always showing.

  The censor has been at work again.

  Is he protecting me, or am I protecting him?

  This trailer’s a horror, I won’t watch it,

  this one makes my heart burn with longing,

  this is a mist of inte
rrupted shapes

  urgently speaking, just out of earshot –

  experimental, I call it.

  The projectionist should be on double time.

  He’s got a kid in with him, they’re so bored

  they play Brag rather than watch the screen.

  The ice-cream girl’s tired of pacing the aisles.

  She rests her thumbs in the tray-straps, and dreams.

  It’s a rainy afternoon in Goole

  and this cinema’s the last refuge

  for men in macs and kids bunking off school.

  They yawn, pick their nails and dream

  by text-message. Look at the screen,

  it says CU, CU, CU.

  Depot

  The panting of buses through caves of memory:

  school bus with boys tossing off

  in the back seat when I was eight,

  knowing the words, not knowing

  what it was those big boys were murkily doing,

  and the conductor with fierce face

  yelling down farm lanes at kids as they ran

  Can you not get yourselves up in the morning?

  The sway of buses into town

  the way the unlopped branches of lime

  knocked like sticks against railings,

  the way women settled laps and bags,

  shut their eyes, breathed out on a cigarette,

  gave themselves to nothing for ten minutes

  as someone else drove the cargo of life,

  until the conductor broke their drowse

  in a flurry of one-liners,

  and they found coin in their fat purses.