Helen Dunmore was a prolific British poet, novelist, short story writer, and children's book author whose work touches upon themes of motherhood, war, friendship, childhood, and nature. She was the winner of multiple literary awards, including the 1987 Poetry Book Society Choice Award for The Raw Garden, the 1996 Orange Prize for A Spell of Winter, and the 2017 Costa Book Poetry and Book of the Year Award for Inside the Wave. Dunmore came from a large family (she was the second of four children, and her father was the eldest of twelve), and this fact influenced her life and her writing. In a large family, one not only hears a great deal of stories, but different versions of the same story. Untold secrets, the past coming back to haunt the present—all of this unfolds in Dunmore's writing.
The clean and precise language of her work succeeds in communicating the complexity of life, including the various ways in which time is experienced. One example is from her poem "The Malarkey," winner of the 2010 National Poetry Competition. A parent's sense of loss after the children have grown up and left is capable of bending time: "You looked away just once / as you leaned on the chip-shop counter, / and forty years were gone" (Lines 16-18). Her first and last publications were poetry collections: The Apple Fall, her first in 1982, and Inside the Wave, just under two months before her death in 2017. Her poetry has been described as equally sensuous as it is bare-boned. For example, Dunmore celebrates her circumstances in "Glad of These Times:" "I am not hungry, I do not curtsey, / I lock my door with my own key..." (Lines 7-8). Whether organizing the pacing of a historical novel or composing the rhythm of a celebratory poem, Dunmore writes with a musical ear.
Helen Dunmore was a British author whose work addresses themes of motherhood, war, friendship, childhood, and nature. Originally published in her 2007 collection Glad of These Times, the poem “To My Nine-Year-Old Self” is a dramatic monologue in...
