HELEN DUNMORE
GLAD OF THESE TIMES
A celebrated winner of fiction’s Orange Prize, Helen Dunmore is as spellbinding a storyteller in her poetry as in her novels. Glad of These Times is full of haunting, joyous and wry narratives. These poems explore the fleetingness of life, its sweetness and intensity, the short time we have on earth and the pleasures of the earth, and death as the frame which sharpens everything and gives it shape.
Glad of These Times was Helen Dunmore’s first poetry book after Out of the Blue: Poems 1975-2001, her comprehensive selection drawing on seven previous collections. It brings together poems of great lyricism, feeling and artistry. It has since been followed by The Malarkey (2012).
‘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.
COVER PAINTING
Window with Distant Sea by Felicity Mara
COURTESY OF THE ARTIST
Helen Dunmore
GLAD OF THESE TIMES
For Maurice Dunmore
1928–2006
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Acknowledgements are due to the editors of the following publications, in which some of these poems first appeared: Being Alive: the sequel to ‘Staying Alive’ (Bloodaxe Books, 2004), City: Bristol Today in Poems and Pictures (Paralalia, 2004), La Traductière, Light Unlocked: Christmas Card Poems (Enitharmon Press, 2005), The Long Field (Great Atlantic Publications), New Delta Review, Poetry (Chicago), Poetry Review and The Way You Say the World: A Celebration for Anne Stevenson (Shoestring Press, 2003).
CONTENTS
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
City lilacs
Crossing the field
Litany
Don’t count John among the dreams
The other side of the sky’s dark room
Convolvulus
The grey lilo
Yellow butterflies
Plume
Odysseus
The blue garden
Violets
The rowan
Barnoon
Getting into the car
Glad of these times
Off-script
‘Indeed we are all made from the dust of stars’
Tulip
Beautiful today the
Dead gull on Porthmeor
Narcissi
Dolphins whistling
Borrowed light
A winter imagination
Athletes
Pneumonia
Wall is the book
Gorse
Blackberries after Michaelmas
To my nine-year-old self
Fallen angel
Bridal
Still life with ironing
Spanish Irish
Cowboys
Below Hungerford Bridge
Ophelia
Winter bonfire
One A.M.
Lemon and stars
Cutting open the lemons
Hearing owls
‘Often they go just before dawn’
May voyage
About the Author
Copyright
City lilacs
In crack-haunted alleys, overhangs,
plots of sour earth that pass for gardens,
in the space between wall and wheelie bin,
where men with mobiles make urgent conversation,
where bare-legged girls shiver in April winds,
where a new mother stands on her doorstep and blinks
at the brightness of morning, so suddenly born –
in all these places the city lilacs are pushing
their cones of blossom into the spring
to be taken by the warm wind.
Lilac, like love, makes no distinction.
It will open for anyone.
Even before love knows that it is love
lilac knows it must blossom.
In crack-haunted alleys, in overhangs,
in somebody’s front garden
abandoned to crisp packets and cans,
on landscaped motorway roundabouts,
in the depth of parks
of flesh and cash, where mobiles ring
and the deal is done – here the city lilacs
release their sweet, wild perfume
then bow down, heavy with rain.
Crossing the field
To live your life is not as simple as to cross a field.
RUSSIAN PROVERB
To cross the field on a sunset of spider-webs
sprung and shining, thistle heads
white with tufts that are harvest
tended and brought to fruit by no one,
to cross the long field as the sun goes down
and the whale-back Scillies show damson
twenty miles off, as the wind sculls
out back, and five lighthouses
one by one open their eyes,
to cross the long field as it darkens
when rooks are homeward, and gulls
swing out from the tilt of land
to the breast of ocean – now is the time
the vixen stirs, and the green lane’s
vivid with footprints.
A field is enough to spend a life in.
Harrow, granite and mattress springs,
shards and bones, turquoise droppings
from pigeons that gorge on nightshade berries,
a charm of goldfinch, a flight of linnets,
fieldfare and January redwing
venturing westward in the dusk,
all are folded in the dark of the field,
all are folded into the dark of the field
and need more days
to paint them, than life gives.
Litany
For the length of time it takes a bruise to fade
for the heavy weight on getting out of bed,
for the hair’s grey, for the skin’s tired grain,
for the spider naevus and drinker’s nose
for the vocabulary of palliation and Macmillan
for friends who know the best funeral readings,
for the everydayness of pain, for waiting patiently
to ask the pharmacist about your medication
for elastic bandages and ulcer dressings,
for knowing what to say
when your friend says how much she still misses him,
for needing a coat although it is warm,
for the length of time it takes a wound to heal,
for the strange pity you feel
when told off by the blank sure faces
of the young who own and know everything,
for the bare flesh of the next generation,
for the word ‘generation’, which used to mean nothing.
Don’t count John among the dreams
(i.m. John Kipling, son of Rudyard Kipling,
who died in the Battle of Loos in 1915)
Don’t count John among the dreams
a parent cherishes for his children –
that they will be different from him,
not poets but the stuff of poems.
Don’t count John among the dreams
of leaders, warriors, eagle-eyed stalkers
picking up the track of
lions.
Even in the zoo he can barely see them –
his eyes, like yours, are half-blind.
Short, obedient, hirsute
how he would love to delight you.
He reads every word you write.
Don’t count John among your dreams.
Don’t wangle a commission for him,
don’t wangle a death for him.
He is barely eighteen.
Without his spectacles, after a shell-blast,
he will be seen one more time
before the next shell sees to him.
Wounding, weeping from pain,
he will be able to see nothing.
And you will always mourn him.
You will write a poem.
You will count him into your dreams.
The other side of the sky’s dark room
On the other side of the sky’s dark room
a monstrous finger
of lightning plays war.
As clay quivers
beaded with moisture
the night quivers.
Late, towards midnight, a door slams
on the other side of the sky’s dark room.
The spade stretchers
raw earth, helpless to ease
the dark, inward explosion.
Convolvulus
I love these flowers that lie in the dust.
We think the world is what we wish it is,
we think that where we say flowers, there will be flowers,
where we say bombs, there will be nothing
until we turn to reconstruction.
But here on the ground, in the dust
is the striped, lilac convolvulus.
Believe me, how fragrant it is,
the flower of coming up from the beach.
There in the dust the convolvulus squeezes itself shut.
You go by, you see nothing, you are tired
from that last swim too late in the evening.
Where we say bombs, there will be bombs.
The only decision is where to plant them –
these flowers that grow at the whim of our fingers –
but not the roving thread of the convolvulus,
spun from a source we cannot trace.
Below, at the foot of the cliff
the sea laps up the apron of sand
which was our day’s home. Where we said land
water has come, where we said flower
and snapped our fingers, there came nothing.
I love these flowers that lie in the dust
barefaced at noon, candid convolvulus
lilac and striped and flattened underfoot.
Crushed, they breathe out their honey, and slowly
come back to themselves in the balm of the night.
But a lumber of engines grows in the seaward sky –
how huge the engines, huge the shadow of planes.
The grey lilo
The grey lilo with scarlet and violet
paintballed into its hollows, on which
my daughter floats, from which her delicate wrist
angles, while her hand sculls the water,
the grey lilo where my daughter floats,
her wet hair smooth to her skull,
her eyes closed, their dark lashes
protecting her from the sky’s envy
of their sudden, staggering blue,
the grey lilo, misted with condensation,
idly shadows the floor of the pool
as if it had a journey to go on –
but no, it is only catching the echo
of scarlet and violet geraniums,
and my daughter is only singing
under her breath, and the time that settles
like yellow butterflies, is only
just about to move on –
Yellow butterflies
They are the sun’s fingerprints on grey pebbles
two yards from the water,
dabbed on the eucalyptus, the olive,
the cracked pot of marigolds,
and now they pulse again, sucking
dry the wild thyme,
or on a sightless bird, not yet buried
they feast a while.
If they have a name, these yellow butterflies,
they do not want it; they know what they are,
quivering, sated, and now once more
printing sun, sun, and again sun
in the olive hollows.
Plume
If you were to reach up your hand,
if you were to push apart the leaves
turning aside your face like one who looks
not at the sun but where the sun hides –
there, where the spider scuttles
and the lizard whips out of sight –
if you were to search
with your small, brown, inexperienced hands
among the leaves that shield the fire of the fruit
in a vault of shadow, if you were to do it
you’d be allowed, for this is your planet
and you are new on it,
if you were to reach inside the leaves
and cup your hands as the fruit descends
like a balloon on the fields of evening
huffing its orange plume
one last time, as the flight ends
and the fruit stops growing –
Odysseus
For those who do not write poems
but have the cause of poems in them:
this thief, sly as Odysseus
who puts out from Albanian waters
into the grape-dark Ionian dawn,
his dirty engine coughing out puffs of black,
to maraud, as his ancestors taught him,
the soft villas of the south –
The blue garden
‘Doesn’t it look peaceful?’ someone said
as our train halted on the embankment
and there was nothing to do but stare
at the blue garden.
Blue roses slowly opened,
blue apples glistened
beneath the spreading peacock of leaves.
The fountain spat jets of pure Prussian
the decking was made with fingers of midnight
the grass was as blue as Kentucky.
Even the children playing
in their ultramarine paddling-pool
were touched by a cobalt Midas
who had changed their skin
from the warm colours of earth
to the azure of heaven.
‘Don’t they look happy?’ someone said,
as the train manager apologised
for the inconvenience caused to our journey,
and yes, they looked happy.
Didn’t we wish we were in the blue garden
soaked in the spray of the hose-snake,
didn’t we wish we could dig in the indigo earth
for sky-coloured potatoes,
didn’t we wish our journey was over
and we were free to race down the embankment
and be caught up in the blue, like those children
who shrank to dots of cerulean
as our train got going.
Violets
Sometimes, but rarely, the ancestors
who set my bones, and that kink
where my parting won’t stay straight – strangers
whose blood beats like mine –
call out for flowers
after the work of a lifetime.
Many lifetimes, and I don’t know them –
the pubs they kept, the market stalls they abandoned,
the cattle driven and service taken,
the mines and rumours and disappearances
of men gone looking for work.
If they left papers, these have dissolved.
Maybe on census nights they were walking
fr
om town to town, on their way elsewhere.
Where they left their bones, who knows.
I can call them up, but they won’t answer.
They want the touch of other hands, that rubbed
their quick harsh lives to brightness.
They have no interest in being ancestors.
They have given enough.
But this I know about: a bunch of violets
laid on a grave, and a woman walking,
and black rain falling on the headstone
of ‘the handsomest man I’ve ever seen’.
The rowan
(in memory of Michael Donaghy)
The rowan, weary of blossoming
is thick with berries now, in bronze September
where the sky has been left to harden,
hammered, ground down
to fine metal, blue-tanned.
In the nakedness beneath the rowan
grow pale cyclamen
and autumn crocus, bare-stemmed.
Beaten, fragile, the flowers still come
eager for blossoming.
Weary of blossoming, the rowan
holds its blood-red tattoo of berries.
No evil can cross this threshold.
The rowan, the lovely rowan
will bring protection.
Barnoon