Posthumous Costa award for poet who wrote candidly about imminent death
Helen Dunmore honoured for collection that explored ‘borderline’ world of life with terminal cancer
HELEN DUNMORE was an intensely private person, but when she was diagnosed with terminal cancer her poems began to “write themselves” and they put her experience of dying at the centre of her work.
It was announced yesterday that Dunmore has been posthumously awarded the Costa Poetry Award, and her family said they believed her illness created an honesty that contributed to the critical acclaim.
The judges described Inside the Wave, which explores “the borderline between the living and the dead”, as “an astonishing set of poems – a final, great achievement”. It is one of five books now in the running for the overall 2017 Costa Book of the Year.
Dunmore’s 10th and final collection of poetry in a career that spanned three decades and included 12 novels, three books of short stories and numerous children’s books, was released just two months before her death, aged 64, in June last year.
The judges appraised the second edition of the work, which includes Hold Out Your Arms, her final poem, written just days before she died.
Patrick Charnley, her son, said: “We are absolutely thrilled. I think that it is a particularly pleasing win because poetry was so important to my mother and I think that poetry was important to all of her work.
“We feel, and she would have felt too, that this is a very special win and something to be celebrated, even though sadly she is not here. A lot of the poems in here are about her illness and about her dying and I think in that sense they are very generous poems.
“She said that almost never had poetry come so easily to her. With some of these poems she said that there was no writing, they just came to her and it was a question of recording them.
“There was obviously something closely related between her dying and her poetry. She was an extremely private person, but what she shows in this collection is something that is universal. She expresses it in a way that many people would not be able to and it is that which people have connected to: this expression of what it is to be dying; the honesty of accepting it and connecting it.”
Dunmore announced that she had been diagnosed with a cancer with a “very poor prognosis” in March last year, but the family had known the year before and it was against that backdrop that she wrote her last collection. Counting Backwards, the first poem in the collection, is about an experience in the operating theatre, with Dunmore later claiming: “The poem wrote itself, unmediated by me”.
Mr Charnley said: “We had a conversation one evening about what we had just found out and the next morning I woke up and I had received this poem.
“She gave comfort to us throughout, not least when it comes to the last poem (Hold Out Your Arms) which in such a difficult time was such a reassuring expression. It is so honest, and I think that is because of the way that the poems came to her. It is almost like an unedited expression, it hasn’t gone through the process that you might expect.
‘She gave comfort to us throughout, not least when it comes to her last poem “Hold Out Your Arms”’
She wrote Hold Out Your Arms and it was done, and I think you feel that honesty when you read it.”
The family are releasing a collection of her short stories, Girl, Balancing and Other Stories, in June this year. “We are very glad to be able to be able to share some of her new work with her readers; it is a bittersweet thing to be able to do, just like this prize is bittersweet, but it is nice that even though she has died, her career can go on and for people to be able to enjoy her work,” Mr Charnley added.