Flowing images with an underlying message
HELEN Dunmore has Yorkshire connections, born in Beverley, graduating from York University.
She has won the Orange prize for fiction, but her first published work was a book of poems.
She has also written children's fiction. This is her first poetry collection since Out of the Blue: Poems 1975-2001.
Dunmore is a wonderful writer in any genre, so a new book is an event to be cherished.
This book praises natural resources, stars, butterflies, lemons, plants. The poem Dolphins whistling is an elegiac warning about our treatment of the environment and natural resources and there are echoes in other poems of her concern of how the human race has the capacity to disturb and spoil the balance so that ultimately it could destroy what is valuable and necessary to its survival.
One or two poems seem less sure-footed in places but most are expressed in beautiful flowing images. Yellow butterflies are "the sun's fingerprints on grey pebbles"; "the tall pines make shapes of their limbs"; "waves break like narcissi"; and TS Eliot is "a big cat gone shabby with keeping". Getting into the car is chilling, with a beginning looking at girls in their wedding cars, but an ending telling us this never happened, as they entered cars where their eyes would be wiped of sight and bodies of breathing.
The final poem is an elegy to a life enjoyed and celebrated. Buy this book and be glad of it.
Glad of These Times by Helen Dunmore Bloodaxe 2007 7.95
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Saturday 11 February 2012
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