Books To Go Back To: 'Inside the Wave' by Helen Dunmore

This was Helen Dunmore's last collection of poetry, published in 2017, a few months before she died. It went on to win The Costa Book of the Year Award 2018.

Although I already owned this book, I acquired it again among a pile of other books from a neighbour clearing out their home. When a neighbour is clearing out their home and says 'Oh, I have some poetry books for you...' you might not find your heart being warmed at the idea. So, it was a pleasant surprise, when I saw among some copies of Heaney, Dunn and Shapcott, Helen Dunmore's collection Inside the Wave. It's a book I remember reading at the time and enjoying, not least because I'd also read and loved her novel Birdcage Walk, set in Clifton, Bristol, where I was living at the time. So, there was already much going in Dunmore's favour before I picked up Inside the Wave.

There are many things I admire about this book, but I particularly enjoy its sense of intimacy. These are personal poems, concerning the poet coming to terms with having cancer, and her own impending death. For these reasons, there is an urgency about these poems which cuts through. However, while urgent, these are not brash or loud poems; often the poems are written in short free verse lines, and rarely run over the page. The occasion for these poems, then, (i.e. the speaker's awareness of her looming death) are really what make this collection so poignant from start to finish. What art form, besides poetry, could have captured and recorded this wonderful writer's last years more profoundly and with such grace?

These poems are particularly excellent: 'September Rain'; 'My people'; 'My life's stem was cut'; 'Inside the Wave'; 'Counting Backwards'. The title poem, 'Inside the Wave', imagines Odysseus returning from his voyage, only to want to lie on the beach and watch the waves topple 'about to be whole'. The ambiguity of that final phrase leaves us wondering whether it's Odysseus who's about to be whole from death, or the wave collapsing and therefore achieving its purpose - it's a finally balanced and finely poised final image.

'September Rain', another poem in which the speaker is lying down listening to the sea (many of the poems in the collection must have been written from the author's sickbed or been inspired by those drawn-out experiences) is the final poem in the collection and one of the most poignant as the poet imagines being 'on the deep water/ lightly held by one ankle/ out of my depth, waiting.' It's chilling and sad, to think the poet was at the time so close to death, and this image conveys that sense of utter helplessness and passivity.

Yet, these are not poems in which the poet feels sorry for herself. And no finer example could there be of this than 'My life's stem was cut' in which she writes from the perspective of a cut flower:

I know I am dying

But why not keep flowering

As long as I can

From my cut stem?

This sense of not just stoicism but resistance prevails through the book and is a testament to Dunmore's spirit. This is particularly impressive given the pain she must have experienced during her cancer treatment, which features in 'My people' in which she writes starkly 'My people are the dying.../ This is my vigil: the lit candle/ The pain, the breath of my people/ drawn in pain.' 'Counting Backwards' is the first poem of the collection and takes in the poet's experience of going under anaesthetic (presumably general anaesthetic) and the surreal slant that puts on her world as she drops into unconsciousness as the anaesthetist counts to himself 'backwards, all wrong.' This motif of lying down and waiting, and themes of the line between consciousness and unconsciousness are not just probed but explored with great feeling, imagination and lyricism in this collection. The result is a book which speaks to the reader intimately, and quietly but with lasting impact.