Out of the Blue: Poems 1975-2001
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
Babes 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 interrupted 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.