Out of the Blue

Bloodaxe author Helen Dunmore read from her recent fiction at this summer's Edinburgh International Book Festival. Our web site editor spoke to her afterwards.

Helen Dunmore is late. I'm waiting in bright sunshine in Edinburgh's Charlotte Square Gardens for her to finish her lunch. I have arranged to interview her inside a Mongolian yurt - the Edinburgh Book Festival's "Author Oasis", but the fierce press secretary insists that I stay outside in the journalistic desert until Helen arrives. She must be afraid I'll let my camels polish off the free wine.

So I am standing outside like a reproachful teacher at the school gate when Dunmore arrives. I'm embarrassed, but she looks positively ashamed, apologising profusely.

Dunmore has a shy, self-effacing manner, coupled with nervous energy. She is tall, her fine-boned face surrounded by eye-wateringly blonde hair. Born in Yorkshire in 1952, she taught in Finland for two years before moving to Bristol where she still lives.

Dunmore won the Orange Prize in 1996

She has published six volumes of poetry with Bloodaxe, and a seventh, "Out of the Blue", is out in October. She is even better known as a fiction writer, winning the Orange Prize with "A Spell of Winter" in 1996.

"Out of the Blue" collects together poetry written between 1975 and 2001. It contains 29 new poems, selections from "Secrets", a collection for children published by Bodley Head in 1994, and all the poems that Dunmore wishes to keep in print from her previous Bloodaxe books.

I asked her how she had decided what to keep in print, and what to discard.

"I went through it with a good friend of mine, the poet Phillip Gross. We know each other's work very well, and he talked to me about the poems I'd excluded. He thought some of them should be there and maybe it was more for personal rather than poetic reasons that I didn't want them in".

A poem can embarrass you

"That can happen of course - a certain poem or its subject matter embarrasses you. You just want rid of it but you shouldn't really."

Did she try to put her personal feelings about the poems to one side?

"To a certain extent yes. I'm not the poet now that I was then. I could be the mother of the person who wrote those first poems - they were written when I was 21, 22, 23".

"And yet that poet could do things that I can't do now, and vice versa".

"There are poems you can write at certain times, and never again. I sometimes look at my early poems, and feel surprised that I could have written them".

Dunmore first published poetry, only turning to adult fiction in 1993 with "Zennor in Darkness", a novel about D H Lawrence's experiences in Cornwall during the First World War.

Since then she has published another two historical novels: "A Spell of Winter" (1995) and "The Siege" (2001). She also writes as a critic.

I asked Dunmore if it was difficult turning from historical fiction and journalism to poetry.

"You have to be quite tough with yourself writing professionally. I remember coming home from hospital after the birth of my daughter. I had just walked through the door when I answered the phone, with the baby in my arms. It was an editor asking me for so many words by such a date. I was agreeing to all this, and I thought, do I mention the baby I'm holding? No, just get on with it".

"I like to keep poetry as something separate, as I usually find that a group of poems come along all at once, rather than singly.

Some of the new poems in "Out of the Blue" deal with historical subjects: the slave trade in "Bristol Docks", the realities of medieval life in "Smoke". Others, like the title poem with its doomed World War Two airman, comment on our relationship with a past we can never really pin down. Why has history infiltrated these poems?

"I realise now that I look back on my poems that a lot of them are about history, some overtly, some less obviously. Some are about individual history, others women's history. Often there are individuals looking back at their own history and finding the tiny sparks of moments, of memories that have made them what they are now".

The past is something we can't really know

"The past is something we can't really know and yet we want to memorialise it. To take away somebody's history is about the most violent thing you can do to them I think. To erase documents, to destroy photographs, to take away memories".

"One of the strongest, most basic human desires is to possess history, to have history, both individual, family, communal, social. The manipulation of history has been the great story of the twentieth century. As the population has become literate, as communications have become better so history has been manipulated more and more, and sometimes obliterated".

I asked Dunmore about "With short, harsh breaths", which shares these preoccupations:

You keep her letters in a box
and deal them out like patience
to lie on your breakfast table

stamps obsolete, envelope eagerly torn
by the man who once lived in your skin.

It's a tender, empathic piece of writing, and I wondered if the "you" in the poem was based on somebody specific. Dunmore sidestepped that question, suggesting a (perfectly reasonable) reluctance to expose the personal history behind her writing.

"That poem is about loss. Photographs and letters try to give you memory. And you can open a letter that somebody wrote to you 50, 60 years ago, and it's alive on the page, and yet you can't truly access it. It's a very curious feeling when you're handling documents, whether they're to do with your life or other lives. I think it's eerie".

Dunmore's writing is direct and seems to shun contrivance. Once critic described her as "a poet of social rather than lyrical concerns". Is she comfortable with this description?

"I like to think I do both. To me poetry and fiction work in layers. All art should offer pleasure on a lot of different levels. What I look for initially in a poem is that first shock of delight. You don't know where it comes from".

"It comes from so many different things: the musicality, the words, meanings, associations - but it's almost a physical experience, like when you look at a certain picture. Full of emotion and feeling".

I don't want to write hermetic poetry

"Of course there's an intellectual content, and layers that maybe you won't get if you don't have a certain background, speak a certain language or get certain references. But I don't want to write sealed poetry, a hermetic poetry that's only accessible to people who are prepared to climb a very difficult mountain and be huffing and puffing when they reach the top of it, because poetry is so essential to our lives".

"We think poetry is a rare form, but everybody has some poetry that they carry around with them. It's not really a 'fancy' thing, it's not esoteric".

"I don't think my poetry is particularly difficult. What I hope is that there are enough levels and layers that it can be opened up in different ways, that you don't just read it once and throw it over your shoulder because it's not going to yield any more".

Finally because this interview is for a web site, I asked Dunmore what use she makes of the internet.

"The Poetry Book Society's web site is excellent. Otherwise I use the web for research, and for checking the weather forecast! It's very seductive - there's always the urge to browse and so avoid work".

"I use email a lot to stay in touch with other writers. There are one or two poets who are friends that I exchange email drafts of poems with".

Afterwards, as I am taking Helen's photograph outside the yurt she is harangued good-humouredly by someone sitting nearby in a Hawaiian shirt. It is Philip Pullman, the much-praised writer of fiction for young adults, and I am reminded that the poet, critic and fiction writer I have just interviewed is also celebrated as a children's author.

It seems that whatever Helen Dunmore writes she excels at.