Helen Dunmore

In amongst the raucous cut and thrust, the sneers and groans and cheers of the run-up to the general election, the poet and novelist Helen Dunmore died, aged 64. 

It's easy not to notice her quiet voice amongst the self-advertising noise of our literary media. She wasn't a particularly fashionable writer; I'm quite surprised how many of my well-read friends have hardly heard of her (no point-scoring intended.)

The best of her writing has a grace, a lightness of touch, that I'm going to be cheeky enough to recommend to you. It's a kind of enlightenment. And it works so well because of the clarity of her gaze at the physical world about her.

In her novels, her imagination often worked very successfully through historical settings; her last novel is set in Bristol, amongst a group of radicals, in the days of the French Revolution. Its use of history - the tensions between public and personal - I find highly effective. 

She didn't find out she was dying until she was editing the novel, but in an afterword, she wrote that she must have known subliminally because the novel was “full of a sharper light, rather as a landscape becomes brilliantly distinct in the last sunlight before a storm." 

Her last book of poems, "Inside the Wave," is full of that sharp light. The title poem in particular, gives me what Eliot illuminated for us: the intersection of time with the timeless moment. It uses the story of Odysseus; I'll not bang on about it, though I might in a separate posting. Here it is for you:

"Inside the Wave"

And when at last the voyage was over
The ship docked and the men paid off,
The crew became a scattering
Dotted, unremarkable,
In houses along the hilltop
Where the lamps flamed in welcome
And then grew dim, where a woman turned
As if from habit to the wall.

In the bronze mirror there was a woman
Combing what was left of her hair
And beside her, grimacing,
A dirty old mariner.
He swore and knocked back the chair.

Yes, then Odysseus opened his mouth
And all that was left
Was the sound an old man makes
Between a laugh and a cough.
His toenails were goat's hooves
His hair a wild
Nest of old stories,

He straddled the tiles
As a man of the sea does
But she would not touch
His barnacled lips.
From the fountain, pulse by pulse
Came gouts of blood.

Everything stayed as it was,
There was no unravelling
Of wake behind him,
No abandoning
Uwanted memories and men.
Besides, the earth stank.

He went down to the black rock
Where the sea pours
And the white sand blows,
He turned his back to the land
And thought of nothing
For the voyage was over,
The ship dragged by a chain
Onto the ramp for inspection.

The waves turned and turned
Neither toward nor away from him,
Swash and backwash
Crossing, repeating,
But never the same.
At the lip of the wave, foam
Stuttered and broke.

It was on the inside 
Of the wave he chose
To meditate endlessly
Without words or song,
And so he lay down
To watch it at eye-level,
About to topple
About to be whole.