Counting Backwards Read online

  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.