Reflections on mortality – filtered by the poet’s experience of illness – run through this wide-ranging and consummate collection
Helen Dunmore is a much admired and widely read novelist, but she began her writing career as a poet. Many of the strengths of her fiction were already present in her early collections of poems – for example, the capacity to render the physical world as a tangible presence, or her dramatic grasp of how character begins to disclose itself, or the ability to let a story seem to tell itself rather than be explained. She remarked in the early 90s that she was trying “to do without scaffolding” in her poetry, and successive volumes have demonstrated the developing success of that approach.
The central subject of Inside the Wave is mortality, seen through Dunmore’s experience of cancer. She has made it known that the prognosis is poor. “Pain is yards away / Held off like bad weather”, but the beauty and fascination of the world are undiminished as the continuity of living and dying becomes apparent. There is a tree at the window, or fishermen are seen returning to shore with their catch. There is “the rock where the seaweed clings / And the red anemone throbs in its crevice / Through swash and backwash”. In “The Underworld”, Dunmore notes:
I used to think it was a narrow road
From here to the underworld
But it’s as broad as the sun.
I say to you: I have more acquaintance
Among the dead than the living
And I am not pretending.
It’s pure fact, like this sandwich
Which hasn’t quite tempted anyone.
It was on the inside
Of the wave he chose
To meditate endlessly
Without words or song,
And so he lay down
To watch it at eye-level,
About to topple,
About to be whole.
Finger ballet on the telephone
switchboard,
The one word that flows from the lips
And the one heart by which it is heard
Unrepeatable, fragile. In praise
Of all that cleaves to the note, then
slips
From it and never stays.
She wonders if Father remembers.
Later, when they’ve had their
sandwiches
She might speak of it. There are
hours yet.
Thousands, by her reckoning.