No Map Could Show Them

'When we climb alone
en cordeé feminine,
we are magicians of the Alps -
we make the routes we follow
disappear.'

Helen Mort's riveting second collection is inspired by her two greatest passions: mountaineering and running. In odes to the young women who tramped the Alps in their skirts and petticoats, long hemlines and "fashionable shoes," here are poems inspired by Miss Jemima Morrell, a young woman from Yorkshire, who was the first Victorian woman to scale the Swiss peaks. At the heart of the collection lies the breathtaking sequence "Black Rocks," dedicated to Alison Hargreaves, the British climber who perished at the face of K2. These are distinctive and unforgettable poems of passion and precipices, of edges and extremes. No Map Could Show Them confirms Helen's position as one of the finest young poets at work today.

Helen Mort is the five-times winner of the Foyle Young Poets Award, received an Eric Gregory Award in 2007, and won the Manchester Young Writer Prize in 2008. She has published two pamphlets with tall-lighthouse press, the shape of every box and a pint for the ghost (a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice, 2010), and her poems have appeared in the Spectator, Poetry Review, and The Manhattan Review. In 2010, she became the youngest ever Poet in Residence at the Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere.