"Inside the wave" by Helen Dunmore (Bloodaxe, 2017)

A posthumus collection, with poems from Acumen, London Magazine, the Poetry Review, etc. I like the title poem. "Shutting the gate" is a prose moment. "The Halt" is beyond me. I dislike "Hold out your arms". I like "Nightfall in the IKEA Kitchen" but not "At the Spit" or "Terra Incognita". "Girl in the Blue Pool" is attractive. Not "Ten books". In other words, patchy.

There are foreboding phrases -

• In the ward's beautiful contentment/ Freed by opiates./ Hooked to oxygen/ We live for the moment (p.20)
• I hear your breath, now failing/ As all the breaths of your life become/ Petals endlessly opening/ Inward, where the dark is (p.50)
• My people are the dying,/ I am of their company/ And they are mine, We wake in the wan hour/ Between three and four, Listen to the rain (p.64). I used this idea, and I've seen others use it.
• I am on the deep deep water/ Lightly held by one ankle/ Out of my depth, waiting (p.65)

Perhaps it's unfair to expect too much originality when writing about such a common topic.

She's best with water imagery - "I know your/ Confusion of ripples against the lakeshore/ Welcoming laughter/ The sounds of home/ Ringing like masts in harbour" (p.56). As others below have commented, she fragments the past, makes us look at its details by saying "here" or "now". When (as in her prize-winning "The Malarkey" or here, on p.41) the technique's combined with a mother's love and fears, she's at her best.

Other reviews

• Sean O'Brien (She remarked in the early 90s that she was trying “to do without scaffolding” in her poetry ... 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.)
• Carol Rumens (Dunmore draws on memory a good deal, often contrasting her verb tenses to disturb chronology and produce broad, dreamlike effects)
• Katharine Towers

"Zennor in Darkness" by Helen Dunmore (Penguin, 1994)

Chapter 1 tells us about Clare, Peggy and Hannah. Information isn't dumped on us; it's spread through the chapter. England's at war, which changes people's attitude to sex and death - "She wonders what a U-boat looks like when it rises above the water. It must be very like a basking shark, she thinks. She has seen basking sharks from the cliffs, lying offshore in warm weather, seeming to do nothing and said to wish no harm, though they can turn a boat over if they are frightened. But the U-boat strikes, then it comes up black-shouldered and streaming with water and lies there watching to be sure of its kill, while men thresh in the oily water, and nobody comes. Next day the waves are full of tins and oil and smashed wood" (p.13).

In chapter 2 we meet "Lawrence" - "He is growing vegetables to eke out his tiny income. He earns his living by his writing, and it has shrunk close to nothing since his novel was seized by the police in November 1915 and prosecuted for obscenity". He's a pacifist, and Frieda's German, so the locals are suspicious.

Point-of-view (PoV) is fluid, changing from person to person rapidly, and varying in the depth of stream-of-consciousness.

• On p.179 for example there's a paragraph that begins with Clare's PoV, 3rd-person privileged, then becomes 1st person

  Clare turns her face into the pillow and grips it. Hannah hinted at something in Sam's letter; something which had happened to Sam, and changed him. There must be things I don't know and can't begin to imagine

• Chapter 5 begins with Clare's PoV. She meets a man, who's talking at the start of this extract -

  '... the cottage doesn't belong with the farm. We rent it from Captain Short, down in St Ives. I daresay you know him, too.' A little sideways look. Oh. Yes. Now I know who you are. Or think I do. You're the man they have all been talking about. 'Did you ever hear the likes of it! Captain Short's got Germans staying up at Higher Tregerthen. They've taken his cottage

  There's a 2 page flashback (highly unrealistic of course), then a return to the main time-line, Clare returning in the 3rd person -

  Yes, Clare knows who he is now. But what can she say to him?

• Chapter 22 begins with Clare's PoV, 3rd person, when she was 5. After a few pages it becomes omniscient for a page. Then there's "Nan sews. Her thoughts are like stitches, each one tiny and precise and not much in itself, but making up the strong seam" followed by Nan's introspection, then "Fifteen years later Nan sews and thinks of Clare", the introspection continuing. Then suddenly we seeing things from Clare's 1st person PoV.

Throughout there are little bursts of lyricism or imagery - "each gravestone lapped with new grass", p.40; "he pours a long white tongue of milk into Clare's jug", p.92; etc. Chapters sometimes start with a lyrical, scene-setting description -

• "Day after day it doesn't rain. Mid-May, blazing hot, with blackthorn fully out and bluebells bowed over, hanging their sappy stems in the heat. The air smells tauntingly of honey and salt", Ch 4
• "Zennor church door creaks and opens. Outside, the unusual May heat simmers. It is noon and quiet. Dogs lie in the dust. Butterflies skim gravestones and the pointing finger of shadow on the sundial to the left of the church porch is sharply distinct", Ch 7

Chapters can close lyrically, with sudden PoV switches.

• At the end of Chapter 2, we're in the heads of Lawrence and Frieda. Neither sees the patrol boat -

  The boat rocks while its crew look and listen. Their eyes rake the rocks. Nothing. But there must be something. It is four o'clock. The men out in the fields straighten as they see the girl reach the gate with a cloth-covered basket and a jug of cold tea. She will hand it over the gate to them, because she does not want the dung on her skirts. Meanwhile the postman toils seven miles uphill from St Ives, with the Berliner Tageblatt in his saddlebag. p.23

• This ends a chapter

  How can he know what she talks about when he's not there? Futile even to want to know. But he does. He imagines the girls leaning together, confiding. He pulls back sharply from the thought, flinching at his own prurience. Again he thinks of the lists. Of Hannah's spread legs. Of Sam with the sun on his back. How Clare feels his look on her. She glances at him and half smiles, but does not stop what she is doing p.39

The singer Eliane and the Rector are presented in stream-of-consciousness passages though their appearances are brief. Sometimes a character tells us everything - e.g. "She's left me nothing to love here, only my Clare. I can see the beauty everywhere, and it pierces me, but I am never at home. It is a beauty. It is a beauty which disturbs me without ever offering the comfort of familiarity or possession. I live with my back turned to everything I know, and no matter how long I live here it will be the same. I would find it easier if the place were less beautiful" (Clare's father on p.249). But we don't know what goes on in John William's head ...

The ending rather drags, and Lawrence's role in the plot isn't convincing, nor is the betrayal of him by Clare's father.

Other reviews

• Elaine Feinstein (Zennor In Darkness is a first novel, and far from flawless; Helen Dunmore moves too readily from one person's consciousness to another, and at first the present tense seems awkward, even pretentious)
• josbook (I really struggled with this book, something which actually surprised me as this is a typical book I would like. I cannot deny that the writing is excellent, and it is a book which needs to be savoured as the passages are highly descriptive of the area of Cornwall, as is the flora and fauna. Dunmore has also handled the experiences and descriptions of war well and I felt moved by what was written and for that the book has its place. But for me it was the characters which let the book down)
• Goodreads

"ice cream" by Helen Dunmore (Penguin, 2000)

According to a review snippet on the back cover, "Her usual themes are here: loneliness, love, weather, landscapes - and food. The first 2 stories were very tame. "You Stayed Awake with Me" has more that I'd expect to see in a story

• "It's possible that there were things I taught Janet too, but I don't remember them. Once we saw a dead porpoise, with words carved into his flesh" (p.28). But how did they know it was male? And what were the words?
• "She sounded plaintive, just as she sounded when she made a chicken pie and there was half of it left over" (p.34)

"The Fag" is minor (3 pages). "Leonardo, Michelangelo, Superstork" is Atwood-style SF, set in a world where natural conception is punishable by the baby's death. The story doesn't get much beyond its premise. Near the middle of "The Lighthouse Keeper's wife" are 2 pages that change our attitude to the couple - attention turns from the isolated, vertical lighthouse to the horizontal, rigid wife. "Be Vigilant, Rejoice, Eat Plenty" is minor; both "The Clear and Rolling Water" and "Living Out" are better. In "Mason's Mini-break" an author becomes source material for a minor character in another author's novel, but there's a twist. "Salmon" is way too slight.

I liked "The Icon Room" - detail of the external world and the inner life of the main character are more extensive. In the following, the character's at a hotel table when a man interrupts her reading

'Resurrection. Miracle. Not believing ...' murmurs the man, running his finger down the page. The stiff curls of the carnation are becoming sodden. Ulli fishes the flowers out of its spilled water, and rubs it against her lips. Resurrection. She feels two stocky white candles crossed like a pair of scissors against her throat. She is a child who gets tonsillitis over and over. Her sickness mars winter after winter. her grandmother takes her to church on the feast of St Blaise, to be blessed. The candles cross like cake tongs, like kitchen scissors, like instruments for probing wounds. Their dense cold waxiness appals her. But she will never move away. It is like the whiskeriness of her grandfather's kiss. You must accept these things, to show love. The candles are stocky and blunt. They will not hurt anyone. Now she smells the dank flower-water and feels the dullness of petals against her lips. Her tonsillitis went on for years (p.129)

"Coosing" is pretty good (the verb coosing means "going", but the related noun means something coarser). Both "The Kiwi-fruit Arbour" and "Emily's Ring" delay an important piece of information ("people who are 'exceptionally gifted', and win scholarships to study in Paris" (p.177), and "They know my own mother gave me my ring when I was seven, the same age as Margaret. That was the year she died" (p.187)). "Swimming into the Millennium" is minor. "Lisette" is telly, but ok.

So there are 2 or 3 good stories. Too many of the others make do with one worthwhile feature - a little twist, a passage of observation, or a sudden rounding of character - instead of making each paragraph count. Slices of life sliced too thin.

Other reviews

• Sonia Chopra
• Kathy Weissman
• Kirkus Review
• Publisher's Weekly

"The Malarkey" by Helen Dunmore (Bloodaxe, 2012)

Barely a poem lacks repetition. A common ploy is to repeat the first line at the start of the final stanza, or halfway though the poem, or both.

Page	Phrase	Freq
10	Come out now and stand beside me	3
14	the water is wide where we stand	4
15	I owned a woman once so high-coloured	2
29	Pressed in the soil's black web	2
30	All you who .. awake ... the dark of the night	2
31	Blue against blue, blue into deeper blue	2
41	O feverish instrument	3
42	says how beautiful	2
43	through the ... lock gates	2
50	he wears	4
54	I am the captainess of laundry	3
63	The kingdom of the dead is like	3

Several of these repeated lines are repeated in the title too. But that's not all. The first 3 lines of the 14-line "Harbinger" are repeated at the end. The first 3 lines of "Lemon tree in November" are nearly repeated at the end, and one of the lines is repeated in "Bildad". In "The Captainness of Laundry" well over half of the lines are duplicates.

Add to that variations - e.g. in stanza 1 of "Agapanthus above Porthmeor" there's "and the flower here, touchable,/ a blue that gathers to it/ the sky, the sea" and at the end there's "flower-filled sureness./ Love is here, touchable,/ gathering our lives to it". In a poem called "Longman English Series" it says

In Notes, Lawrence is mildly taken to task for the way his repetitions can degenerate

which is tempting fate a bit. It feels to me as if when she runs out of inspiration or doesn't know how to end a piece, she resorts to repetition. Sometimes it works - and would work more often if the poems were read in isolation. In the poems that succeed for me ("I Heard You Sing in the Dark", "The Deciphering" and "The Filament" ), and in the title poem, rather than repeat she returns to the context (rather than words) of the earlier lines, offering new facets.

I like how "Boatman" ends

You say there is no boatman there was never any boatman and I say, hold tight to my hand for the water is wide where we stand

and I like "The Snowfield". Not so hot are "I owned a woman once", "At Ease", "Visible and Invisible" (a little idea bloated to double its natural length), "The Last Heartbeat" and "The Old Mastery".

"Playing her pieces" has 5 4-lined stanzas, all the first lines with the same end-rhyme, but otherwise she uses little rhyme. There are 2 6-page pieces of prose, both about poets - nothing that could be mistaken for a poem. A single page of prose about a boat is more apt.

Other reviews

• Suzi Feay (The Independent)
• John Field

"Glad of these times" by Helen Dunmore (Bloodaxe, 2007)

I prefer her stories. The most dominant technique that she employs here is repetition. Nearly half the poems irregularly repeat. In particular the final line repeats an earlier one. Of course, there's nothing wrong with that per se, but I think here it's over-used

p.	phrase	freq
9	city lilies	3
10	cross[ing] the [long] field	4
11	for the	10
12	Don't count John	4
13	the other side of the sky's dark room	3
14	the flowers that	3
15	The grey lilo	4
17	if you were	5
21	weary of blossoming	2
24	glad of these/my times	5
27	are made from the dust of stars	3
28	the lovely bulb of your roundness	2
30	you could use his wing as a fan	2
32	[we heard] dolphins whistling	7
35	Surely it's not too much to ask	2
37	on our raft	2
38	Wall is the [holy] book	3
42	through the world's cold	2
48	I dreamed [that] my love	4
54	a wash of stars	2
55	the moon [as it] voyages	3

It's no coincidence that many of these repeated phrases involve flowers and night skies - they're common themes. I most like "Violets" (a stanza too long), 'Indeed we are all made from the dust of stars', and "Lemon and Stars"

"Love of a Fat Man" by Helen Dunmore (Penguin, 1997)

A third of the way through I was beginning to be impressed. There's little variety in the point of view, but the epiphanies are well done. "Annina" and "Girls on Ice" show that she can write other types of stories as well. Too many of the later stories fail to earn their keep. Quilts, tanned legs, living away from home and gifts of gloves are popular props.