Counting Backwards
Poems 1975-2017
Published on 21. February 2019
Book
Paperback/Softback
416 pages
978-1-78037-445-1 (ISBN)
Description
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.
Reviews / Votes
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 * She was - first and last - a poet. Her first collection, The Apple Fall, was published when she was 30, her last, Inside the Wave, in April this year... Her last collection is her most spare and moving. Inside the Wave is smooth as a sea pebble and liminal - poised between life and death. -- Kate Kellaway * Guardian * 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 *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Tyne and Wear
United Kingdom
Dimensions
Height: 234 mm
Width: 156 mm
ISBN-13
978-1-78037-445-1 (9781780374451)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
E-Book
02/2019
Bloodaxe Books Ltd
€12.99
Available for download
Person
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 ?rst 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, was published by Bloodaxe in 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.
Content
Inside the Wave (2017)
19 Counting Backwards
20 The Underworld
21 Shutting the Gate
22 In Praise of the Piano
23 Re-opening the old mines
24 Inside the Wave
26 Odysseus to Elpenor
28 Plane tree outside Ward 78
29 The shaft
30 Leave the door open
31 My life's stem was cut
32 The Bare Leg
34 The Place of Ordinary Souls
35 My daughter as Penelope
37 The Lamplighter
38 The Halt
39 Bluebell Hollows
40 A Loose Curl
41 Hornsea, 1952
42 Festival of stone
43 A Bit of Love
44 Winter Balcony with Dunnocks
45 Mimosa
46 Nightfall in the IKEA Kitchen
48 The Duration
49 At the Spit
50 Terra Incognita
51 Four cormorants, one swan
52 Girl in the Blue Pool
53 February 12th 1994
54 What shall I do for my sister in the day she shall be spoken for?
55 In Secret
55 All the breaths of your life
56 Her children look for her
57 Little papoose
58 Cliffs of Fall
59 Five Versions from Catullus
59 1 Through Babel of Nations
59 2 Undone
59 3 Sirmio
60 4 Dedication
61 5 Sparrow
62 Rim
63 On looking through the handle of a cup
64 Ten Books
66 Subtraction
67 My people
68 September Rain
70 Hold out your arms
The Malarkey (2012)
75 The Malarkey
76 Come Out Now
78 The Inbox
79 Boatman
80 I Owned a Woman Once
82 Longman English Series
83 Writ in Water
88 Dis
89 Newgate
90 At Ease
91 Harbinger
91 The Hyacinths
92 The Night Workers
93 Agapanthus above Porthmeor
94 Visible and Invisible
94 The Snowfield
95 Lemon tree in November
96 Bildad
99 Skulking
99 Basement at Eighteen Folgate Street
100 Barclays Bank, St Ives
100 Playing Her Pieces
101 Pianist, 103,
102 The Torn Ship
103 Taken in Shadows
108 Prince Felipe Prospero (1657-1661)
108 Picture Messages
109 Lethe
110 The Queue's Essentially
110 The Captainess of Laundry
111 The Day's Umbrellas
112 The Deciphering
113 The Tarn
113 The Gift
114 What Will You Say
115 Cloud
115 I Have Been Thinking of You So Loudly
116 The Kingdom of the Dead
117 The Last Heartbeat
117 The Old Mastery
118 The Overcoat
118 Window Cleaners at Ladysmith Road
119 I Heard You Sing in the Dark
120 La Recouvrance
121 The Filament
Glad of These Times (2007)
125 City lilacs
126 Crossing the field
127 Litany
128 Don't count John among the dreams
129 The other side of the sky's dark room
129 Convolvulus
130 The grey lilo
131 Yellow butterflies
132 Plume
132 Odysseus
133 The blue garden
134 Violets
135 The rowan
136 Barnoon
137 Getting into the car
138 Glad of these times
140 Off-script
140 'Indeed we are all made from the dust of stars'
141 Tulip
142 Beautiful today the
143 Dead gull on Porthmeor
144 Narcissi
145 Dolphins whistling
147 Borrowed light
148 A winter imagination
149 Athletes
149 Pneumonia
150 Wall is the book
151 Gorse
152 Blackberries after Michaelmas
152 To my nine-year-old self
153 Fallen angel
154 Bridal
155 Still life with ironing
155 Spanish Irish
156 Cowboys
156 Below Hungerford Bridge
157 Ophelia
158 Winter bonfire
158 One a.m.
159 Lemon and stars
159 Cutting open the lemons
160 Hearing owls
161 'Often they go just before dawn'
162 May voyage
Out of the Blue (2001)
165 Out of the Blue
166 The man on the roof
167 Giraffes in Hull
168 Jacob's drum
169 That old cinema of memory
170 Depot
170 A lorry-load of stuff
172 Virgin with Two Cardigans
173 Ice coming
174 Cyclamen, blood-red
175 Piers Plowman: The Crucifixion & Harrowing of Hell
185 Smoke
186 Bristol Docks
188 The spill
189 Without remission
190 The rain's coming in
191 As good as it gets
192 If only
192 Mr Lear's ring
193 Fortune-teller on Church Road
194 Sleeveless
194 The point of not returning
195 The form
196 The sentence
196 With short, harsh breaths
197 The footfall
198 The coffin-makers
199 Inside out
200 The blessing
from Bestiary (1997)
203 Candle poem
204 At the Emporium
204 Next door
205 He lived next door all his life
206 Under the leaves *
207 The surgeon husband
208 Fishing beyond sunset
208 Hare in the snow
209 Need
211 Sometimes in the rough garden of city spaces
212 I should like to be buried in a summer forest
213 The scattering
214 All the things you are not yet
215 Ferns on a hospital window *
216 Diving girl
217 A pretty shape
218 Viking cat in the dark
219 Baby sleep
220 Frostbite
221 Basketball player on Pentecost Monday
222 Tiger lookout
223 Tiger Moth caterpillar
224 Hungry Thames
224 The wasp
225 On growing a black tulip *
226 Little Ellie and the timeshare salesman
227 Bouncing boy
227 Ghost at noon
228 Greek beads
229 Tea at Brandt's
230 We are men, not beasts
from Recovering a Body (1994)
233 To Virgil
234 Three Ways of Recovering a Body
236 Holiday to Lonely
237 Poem in a Hotel
238 The Bike Lane
239 Drink and the Devil
240 Ahvenanmaa
241 Rubbing Down the Horse
242 You came back to life in its sweetness
243 Heimat
244 In the Desert Knowing Nothing
245 Poem on the Obliteration of 100,000 Iraqi Soldiers
246 The Yellow Sky
247 Getting the Strap
248 Adders
249 The conception
250 Scan at 8 weeks
251 Pedalo
255 Beetroot Soup
256 The Diving Reflex
258 Bathing at Balnacarry
259 Boys on the Top Board
260 Sylvette Scrubbing
261 Babes in the Wood
262 Cajun
263 Then I think how the train *
264 Skips
264 Time by Accurist
265 The Silent Man in Waterstones
266 The Wardrobe Mistress
268 When You've Got
269 Afterword *
from Secrets (1994)
273 Lemon sole
274 Christmas caves
275 That violet-haired lady
276 Whooper swans
277 Snow Queen
278 The cuckoo game
279 The butcher's daughter
281 The greenfield ghost
282 Herring girl
283 Russian doll
284 Breeze of ghosts
from Short Days, Long Nights (1991)
287 Those shady girls
287 The dream-life of priests
289 Sisters leaving before the dance
291 On not writing certain poems
292 Privacy of rain
293 Dancing man
295 At Cabourg II
296 Baron Hardup
297 Nearly May Day
300 Three workmen with blue pails
301 Brown coal
303 Safe period
304 Big barbershop man
305 The dry well
306 Our family, swimming again *
307 Sweet pepper *
308 Heron
309 One yellow chicken
310 Sailing to Cuba
310 Off the West Pier
312 Winter 1955
313 Rinsing
313 To Betty, swimming
314 In Berber's Ice Cream Parlour
315 On drinking lime juice in September *
316 Not going to the forest
317 Lutherans
from The Raw Garden (1988)
321 Code-breaking in the Garden of Eden
323 Seal run
325 Wild strawberries
326 A mortgage on a pear tree
337 A paeony truss on Sussex place
328 Permafrost
329 At Cabourg
331 Ploughing the roughlands
332 The land pensions
333 A dream of wool
334 New crops
335 Shadows of my mother against a wall
336 Air layering
336 The argument
337 The peach house
338 A meditation of the glasshouses
339 The haunting of Epworth
340 Preaching at Gwennap
341 On circuit from Heptonstall Chapel
342 US 1st Division Airborne Ranger at rest in Honduras
343 One more for the beautiful table
344 Lambkin
344 Dublin 1971
346 The hard-hearted husband
348 Malta
349 Candlemas
349 Pilgrims
350 An Irish miner in Staffordshire
from The Sea Skater (1986)
353 The bride's nights in a strange village
354 Lazarus *
355 Christmas roses
356 I imagine you sent back from Africa
358 The knight *
359 In memoriam Cyril Smith 1913-1945
361 The parachute packers
363 Porpoise washed up on the beach
364 In deep water
365 Lady Macduff and the primroses
367 Mary Shelley
370 The plum tree
371 The air-blue gown
373 My sad descendants
374 Patrick at four years old on Bonfire Night
375 The horse landscape
376 Thetis
377 In the tents
378 Uncle Will's telegram
379 Rapunzel
381 Bewick's swans *
382 The sea skater
383 In the tea house
384 Florence in permafrost
386 Missile launcher passing at night
from The Apple Fall (1983)
389 The marshalling yard
390 A cow here in the June meadow
391 Zelda
392 Annunciation off East Street *
393 The Polish husband
395 The damson
396 In Rodmell Garden
397 The apple fall
398 Pictures of a Chinese nursery *
399 Pharaoh's daughter
400 Domestic poem
401 Patrick I
402 Patrick II
403 Weaning
403 Clinic day *
404 Approaches to winter
406 The night chemist
407 St Paul's
408 Poem for December 28
409 Greenham Common
410 Poem for hidden women
412 If no revolution come
414 A safe light
415 Near Dawlish
415 The last day of the exhausted month
416 Second marriages *
417 The deserted table
418 The writer's son
419 Ollie and Charles at St Andrew's Park
420 Winter fairs
420 In a wood near Turku
421 Landscape from the Monet Exhibition at Cardiff
422 Breakfast
423 index of titles and first lines
19 Counting Backwards
20 The Underworld
21 Shutting the Gate
22 In Praise of the Piano
23 Re-opening the old mines
24 Inside the Wave
26 Odysseus to Elpenor
28 Plane tree outside Ward 78
29 The shaft
30 Leave the door open
31 My life's stem was cut
32 The Bare Leg
34 The Place of Ordinary Souls
35 My daughter as Penelope
37 The Lamplighter
38 The Halt
39 Bluebell Hollows
40 A Loose Curl
41 Hornsea, 1952
42 Festival of stone
43 A Bit of Love
44 Winter Balcony with Dunnocks
45 Mimosa
46 Nightfall in the IKEA Kitchen
48 The Duration
49 At the Spit
50 Terra Incognita
51 Four cormorants, one swan
52 Girl in the Blue Pool
53 February 12th 1994
54 What shall I do for my sister in the day she shall be spoken for?
55 In Secret
55 All the breaths of your life
56 Her children look for her
57 Little papoose
58 Cliffs of Fall
59 Five Versions from Catullus
59 1 Through Babel of Nations
59 2 Undone
59 3 Sirmio
60 4 Dedication
61 5 Sparrow
62 Rim
63 On looking through the handle of a cup
64 Ten Books
66 Subtraction
67 My people
68 September Rain
70 Hold out your arms
The Malarkey (2012)
75 The Malarkey
76 Come Out Now
78 The Inbox
79 Boatman
80 I Owned a Woman Once
82 Longman English Series
83 Writ in Water
88 Dis
89 Newgate
90 At Ease
91 Harbinger
91 The Hyacinths
92 The Night Workers
93 Agapanthus above Porthmeor
94 Visible and Invisible
94 The Snowfield
95 Lemon tree in November
96 Bildad
99 Skulking
99 Basement at Eighteen Folgate Street
100 Barclays Bank, St Ives
100 Playing Her Pieces
101 Pianist, 103,
102 The Torn Ship
103 Taken in Shadows
108 Prince Felipe Prospero (1657-1661)
108 Picture Messages
109 Lethe
110 The Queue's Essentially
110 The Captainess of Laundry
111 The Day's Umbrellas
112 The Deciphering
113 The Tarn
113 The Gift
114 What Will You Say
115 Cloud
115 I Have Been Thinking of You So Loudly
116 The Kingdom of the Dead
117 The Last Heartbeat
117 The Old Mastery
118 The Overcoat
118 Window Cleaners at Ladysmith Road
119 I Heard You Sing in the Dark
120 La Recouvrance
121 The Filament
Glad of These Times (2007)
125 City lilacs
126 Crossing the field
127 Litany
128 Don't count John among the dreams
129 The other side of the sky's dark room
129 Convolvulus
130 The grey lilo
131 Yellow butterflies
132 Plume
132 Odysseus
133 The blue garden
134 Violets
135 The rowan
136 Barnoon
137 Getting into the car
138 Glad of these times
140 Off-script
140 'Indeed we are all made from the dust of stars'
141 Tulip
142 Beautiful today the
143 Dead gull on Porthmeor
144 Narcissi
145 Dolphins whistling
147 Borrowed light
148 A winter imagination
149 Athletes
149 Pneumonia
150 Wall is the book
151 Gorse
152 Blackberries after Michaelmas
152 To my nine-year-old self
153 Fallen angel
154 Bridal
155 Still life with ironing
155 Spanish Irish
156 Cowboys
156 Below Hungerford Bridge
157 Ophelia
158 Winter bonfire
158 One a.m.
159 Lemon and stars
159 Cutting open the lemons
160 Hearing owls
161 'Often they go just before dawn'
162 May voyage
Out of the Blue (2001)
165 Out of the Blue
166 The man on the roof
167 Giraffes in Hull
168 Jacob's drum
169 That old cinema of memory
170 Depot
170 A lorry-load of stuff
172 Virgin with Two Cardigans
173 Ice coming
174 Cyclamen, blood-red
175 Piers Plowman: The Crucifixion & Harrowing of Hell
185 Smoke
186 Bristol Docks
188 The spill
189 Without remission
190 The rain's coming in
191 As good as it gets
192 If only
192 Mr Lear's ring
193 Fortune-teller on Church Road
194 Sleeveless
194 The point of not returning
195 The form
196 The sentence
196 With short, harsh breaths
197 The footfall
198 The coffin-makers
199 Inside out
200 The blessing
from Bestiary (1997)
203 Candle poem
204 At the Emporium
204 Next door
205 He lived next door all his life
206 Under the leaves *
207 The surgeon husband
208 Fishing beyond sunset
208 Hare in the snow
209 Need
211 Sometimes in the rough garden of city spaces
212 I should like to be buried in a summer forest
213 The scattering
214 All the things you are not yet
215 Ferns on a hospital window *
216 Diving girl
217 A pretty shape
218 Viking cat in the dark
219 Baby sleep
220 Frostbite
221 Basketball player on Pentecost Monday
222 Tiger lookout
223 Tiger Moth caterpillar
224 Hungry Thames
224 The wasp
225 On growing a black tulip *
226 Little Ellie and the timeshare salesman
227 Bouncing boy
227 Ghost at noon
228 Greek beads
229 Tea at Brandt's
230 We are men, not beasts
from Recovering a Body (1994)
233 To Virgil
234 Three Ways of Recovering a Body
236 Holiday to Lonely
237 Poem in a Hotel
238 The Bike Lane
239 Drink and the Devil
240 Ahvenanmaa
241 Rubbing Down the Horse
242 You came back to life in its sweetness
243 Heimat
244 In the Desert Knowing Nothing
245 Poem on the Obliteration of 100,000 Iraqi Soldiers
246 The Yellow Sky
247 Getting the Strap
248 Adders
249 The conception
250 Scan at 8 weeks
251 Pedalo
255 Beetroot Soup
256 The Diving Reflex
258 Bathing at Balnacarry
259 Boys on the Top Board
260 Sylvette Scrubbing
261 Babes in the Wood
262 Cajun
263 Then I think how the train *
264 Skips
264 Time by Accurist
265 The Silent Man in Waterstones
266 The Wardrobe Mistress
268 When You've Got
269 Afterword *
from Secrets (1994)
273 Lemon sole
274 Christmas caves
275 That violet-haired lady
276 Whooper swans
277 Snow Queen
278 The cuckoo game
279 The butcher's daughter
281 The greenfield ghost
282 Herring girl
283 Russian doll
284 Breeze of ghosts
from Short Days, Long Nights (1991)
287 Those shady girls
287 The dream-life of priests
289 Sisters leaving before the dance
291 On not writing certain poems
292 Privacy of rain
293 Dancing man
295 At Cabourg II
296 Baron Hardup
297 Nearly May Day
300 Three workmen with blue pails
301 Brown coal
303 Safe period
304 Big barbershop man
305 The dry well
306 Our family, swimming again *
307 Sweet pepper *
308 Heron
309 One yellow chicken
310 Sailing to Cuba
310 Off the West Pier
312 Winter 1955
313 Rinsing
313 To Betty, swimming
314 In Berber's Ice Cream Parlour
315 On drinking lime juice in September *
316 Not going to the forest
317 Lutherans
from The Raw Garden (1988)
321 Code-breaking in the Garden of Eden
323 Seal run
325 Wild strawberries
326 A mortgage on a pear tree
337 A paeony truss on Sussex place
328 Permafrost
329 At Cabourg
331 Ploughing the roughlands
332 The land pensions
333 A dream of wool
334 New crops
335 Shadows of my mother against a wall
336 Air layering
336 The argument
337 The peach house
338 A meditation of the glasshouses
339 The haunting of Epworth
340 Preaching at Gwennap
341 On circuit from Heptonstall Chapel
342 US 1st Division Airborne Ranger at rest in Honduras
343 One more for the beautiful table
344 Lambkin
344 Dublin 1971
346 The hard-hearted husband
348 Malta
349 Candlemas
349 Pilgrims
350 An Irish miner in Staffordshire
from The Sea Skater (1986)
353 The bride's nights in a strange village
354 Lazarus *
355 Christmas roses
356 I imagine you sent back from Africa
358 The knight *
359 In memoriam Cyril Smith 1913-1945
361 The parachute packers
363 Porpoise washed up on the beach
364 In deep water
365 Lady Macduff and the primroses
367 Mary Shelley
370 The plum tree
371 The air-blue gown
373 My sad descendants
374 Patrick at four years old on Bonfire Night
375 The horse landscape
376 Thetis
377 In the tents
378 Uncle Will's telegram
379 Rapunzel
381 Bewick's swans *
382 The sea skater
383 In the tea house
384 Florence in permafrost
386 Missile launcher passing at night
from The Apple Fall (1983)
389 The marshalling yard
390 A cow here in the June meadow
391 Zelda
392 Annunciation off East Street *
393 The Polish husband
395 The damson
396 In Rodmell Garden
397 The apple fall
398 Pictures of a Chinese nursery *
399 Pharaoh's daughter
400 Domestic poem
401 Patrick I
402 Patrick II
403 Weaning
403 Clinic day *
404 Approaches to winter
406 The night chemist
407 St Paul's
408 Poem for December 28
409 Greenham Common
410 Poem for hidden women
412 If no revolution come
414 A safe light
415 Near Dawlish
415 The last day of the exhausted month
416 Second marriages *
417 The deserted table
418 The writer's son
419 Ollie and Charles at St Andrew's Park
420 Winter fairs
420 In a wood near Turku
421 Landscape from the Monet Exhibition at Cardiff
422 Breakfast
423 index of titles and first lines