Inside the Wave Synopsis
To be alive is to be inside the wave, always travelling until it breaks and is gone. These poems are concerned with the borderline between the living and the dead - the underworld and the human living world - and the exquisitely intense being of both. They possess a spare, eloquent lyricism as they explore the bliss and anguish of the voyage. Inside the Wave is Helen Dunmore's first new poetry book since The Malarkey (2012), whose title-poem won the National Poetry Competition. Her other books include Glad of These Times (2007), and Out of the Blue: Poems 1975-2001 (2001), a comprehensive selection drawing on seven previous collections. Her final poem, 'Hold out your arms', written shortly before her death and not included in the first printing of Inside the Wave, has now been added to the reprint.
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Helen Dunmore Press Reviews
'This traffic between the everyday and mortality requires a perfect control of tone, neither sententious nor sentimental in this familiar setting... In its uninsistent but authoritative way, The Malarkey is a condition-of-England book, driven by a concern for those who have little purchase on their own lives... The Malarkey is Helen Dunmore's best collection, the work of a grown-up for grown-ups who will remember what in the nature of things they've had to lose and what nevertheless they seek to celebrate' - Sean O'Brien, Guardian
'What is wonderful is the unusual way her steadiness as a writer serves as a foil to the mysterious. She prefers to show, not tell...The passing of time is crucial in this collection and especially its most violent trick of making years disappear in a moment...a collection filled with extraordinary, incorporeal moments and with vanishing acts...The personal poems are superb and anything but self-indulgent' - Kate Kellaway, The Observer
'Her latest collection is a clear-eyed, sometimes funny, sometimes sad, meditation on time past and people lost...a superbly structured collection in which poems echo and answer each other' - Suzi Feay, Independent on Sunday.
About Helen Dunmore
Helen Dunmore was the author of fourteen novels. Her first, Zennor in Darkness, explored the events which led to D H Lawrence’s expulsion from Cornwall (on suspicion of spying) during the First World War. It won the McKitterick Prize. Her third novel, A Spell of Winter, won the inaugural Orange Prize, now the Baileys Prize for Women’s Fiction. Her bestselling novel The Siege, set during the Siege of Leningrad, was described by Antony Beevor as ‘a world-class novel’ and was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel of the Year and the Orange Prize.
Helen Dunmore’s work has been translated into more than thirty languages and she was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She died in June 2017.
Author photo © Caroline Forbes
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