Poetry This article is more than 6 years oldReviewInside the Wave by Helen Dunmore – generous and contemplative
This article is more than 6 years oldReflections on mortality – filtered by the poet’s experience of illness – run through this wide-ranging and consummate collection
Helen Dunmore is a much admired and widely read novelist, but she began her writing career as a poet. Many of the strengths of her fiction were already present in her early collections of poems – for example, the capacity to render the physical world as a tangible presence, or her dramatic grasp of how character begins to disclose itself, or the ability to let a story seem to tell itself rather than be explained. She remarked in the early 90s that she was trying “to do without scaffolding” in her poetry, and successive volumes have demonstrated the developing success of that approach.
The central subject of Inside the Wave is mortality, seen through Dunmore’s experience of cancer. She has made it known that the prognosis is poor. “Pain is yards away / Held off like bad weather”, but the beauty and fascination of the world are undiminished as the continuity of living and dying becomes apparent. There is a tree at the window, or fishermen are seen returning to shore with their catch. There is “the rock where the seaweed clings / And the red anemone throbs in its crevice / Through swash and backwash”. In “The Underworld”, Dunmore notes:
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.
The realm of “pure fact” does not of course exclude the imagination. The underworld Dunmore imagines is one with antecedents in classical mythology, terrain she occupies as naturally as her own garden. Ulysses summons the oarsman Elpenor back “from caverns so deep / No camera can fathom them” in order to give his fate a fitting memorial – an oar planted in a mound on the shore. Ulysses himself, having returned to Ithaca, realises that to be home is not to be free, and settles to watching the ocean:
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.
The poet, though, is wedded to words and song, and feels both obliged and privileged to try to praise and lend permanence to moments whose nature is to complete themselves and vanish, as in “In Praise of the Piano”:
Finger ballet on the telephone
switchboard,
The one word that flows from the lips
And the one heart by which it is heard
Unrepeatable, fragile. In praise
Of all that cleaves to the note, then
slips
From it and never stays.
Dunmore recently spoke of the necessity for “rhythmic completion” in poetry. Here the poise that balances the escaping moment draws on Old Testament parallelism, while the closing line alludes to the Book of Job (“Man that is born of woman”). Such devices and references would until quite recently have been taken for granted as common knowledge. Dunmore’s may be the last generation to reach instinctively for scripture, to regard it as common imaginative property.
The scope of her poetry grows in part from her confidence in such proverbial resources and the long view they confer on ostensibly remote matters. One example here is “Closing the Gate”, in which two girls in “brief lovely dresses” – “They might be my daughters- / A little older, I reckon – ” shelter in the poet’s garden, anxious to close the gate because in the street is a car containing two unsavoury-looking men who “don’t look / Much like the sons of anyone”, revving the engine from time to time “So we don’t forget”. The present and the plane of myth intersect, and Dunmore has the assurance to omit almost everything and yet allow the scene to flower darkly in the mind’s eye.
While such dramatic vignettes are a strength of her work (see wonderful earlier poems such as the Profumo-era “Shady Girls”, or the nightmarish “At the Emporium”), Dunmore writes with equal assurance in more detailed biographical pieces such as “Hornsea, 1952”, which perhaps draws on her mother’s life, and “The Duration”. In the latter, a woman remembers running into the sea for fear her young son had gone too far out, making the boy ashamed of her and leaving her skirt wringing wet. Now, years later,
She wonders if Father remembers.
Later, when they’ve had their
sandwiches
She might speak of it. There are
hours yet.
Thousands, by her reckoning.
The knife slips in so swiftly here that it might go unnoticed. A sense of unrealised potential haunts both poems. Equally fascinating is the way she seamlessly represents various ways in which time is experienced – as present, as memory, as what relentlessly happens when nothing much else appears to be happening – by the repetition of the word “now”, and by a slightly flattened tone and eerily simple sentence construction. Henry James, in The Art of Fiction, urged the apprentice novelist to “try to be one of those people on whom nothing is lost”. In a career of great distinction, Dunmore has not only acted on the advice – as both novelist and poet – but has offered the reader a chance to share her remarkable alertness, imaginative range and generosity of spirit.
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