Counting Backwards: Poems 1975-2017 - Softcover

Dunmore, Helen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1780374453 ISBN 13: 9781780374451

Publisher: Bloodaxe Books, 2019

Synopsis

Winner of the Costa Book of the Year for her final collection, Inside the Wave, Helen Dunmore was as spellbinding storyteller in her poetry and in her prose. Her haunting narratives draw us into darkness, engaging our fears and hopes in poetry of rare luminosity, nowhere more so than in Inside the Wave, in its exploration of the borderline between the living and the dead – the underworld and the human living world - and the exquisitely intense being of both. All her poetry casts a bright, revealing light on the living world, by land and sea, on love, longing and loss. Counting Backwards is a retrospective covering ten collections written over four decades, bringing together all the poems she included in her earlier selection, Out of the Blue (2001), with all those from her three later collections, Glad of These Times (2007), The Malarkey (2012) and Inside the Wave (2017), along with a number of earlier poems.

About this title

About the Author

Helen Dunmore (1952-2017) was a poet, novelist, short story and children’s writer. Her poetry books received a Poetry Book Society Choice and Recommendations, the Alice Hunt Bartlett Award, and the Signal Poetry Award. Bestiary was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize in 1997. Inside the Wave won the 2017 Costa Poetry Award and went on to be named Costa Book of the Year. She won first prize in the Cardiff International Poetry Competition in 1990 with her poem ‘Sisters leaving the dance’, and first prize in the National Poetry Competition in 2010 with ‘The Malarkey’. After making her debut with The Apple Fall in 1983, she published all her poetry with Bloodaxe. Her earlier work was collected in Out of the Blue: Poems 1975-2001 (2001), which was followed by Glad of These Times (2007), The Malarkey (2012), and Inside the Wave (2017), her tenth and final collection. A new retrospective, Counting Backwards: Poems 1975-2017, is due from Bloodaxe in February 2019. She published twelve novels and three books of short stories with Penguin, including A Spell of Winter (1995), winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction, Talking to the Dead (1996), The Siege (2001), Mourning Ruby (2003), House of Orphans (2006) and The Betrayal (2010), as well as The Greatcoat (2012) with Hammer, and The Lie (2014), Exposure (2016) and Birdcage Walk (2017) with Hutchinson. A posthumous story collection, Girl, Balancing and Other Stories, followed from Hutchinson in 2018. Born in Beverley, Yorkshire, she studied English at York University, and after graduating in 1973 spent two years teaching in Finland before settling in Bristol.

Review

Dunmore is a particularly lucid writer, and not simply because her poems are so often filled with the play of light. Her language is bare and clean; her forms balladic and unobtrusive... Dunmore seeks to draw attention, not to her mastery of craft, but to her subject and the intricate, original, patterns of her thought... These poems are light-boned, but strong: elegant, complex, fully-turned unions of image, thought and sound. In these times, we should be glad of this voice.' – Kate Clanchy , Guardian. 'We all felt this is a modern classic; a fantastic collection, life-affirming and uplifting. The poems carry powerful messages that speak to all of us.' – Wendy Holden , Chair of Judges, Costa Book of the Year 2017, on Inside the Wave

Edition details

• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 1780374453
• ISBN 13: 9781780374451
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 416