Please select a poem:

the speak Mum speaks when she’s on the phone I asked her one time where it comes from she says it’s the speak of her friends from home the speak Mum speaks like floating and laughing and the words are bubbling whispering hurrying she says it’s the speak of where she comes from the speak Mum speaks like singing and dancing like friends holding hands going out to playtime like a playground with everyone jumping I sit small and say nothing I listen and listen to the speak Mum speaks flashing and shining like jewel diamonds and I want some © Helen Dunmore

Helen’s poems are generally about feelings and moods, but occasionally are anchored in the everyday (for example, her poems about the birth of her son) and can be powerfully direct (for example, her Gulf War poems). Her poetry has been described as sensuous and magical, with a ‘sharp delicacy’ and ‘sureness of touch’. Helen says that what she looks for initially in a poem is ‘that first shock of delight’ which she describes as ‘almost a physical experience, like when you look at a certain picture. Full of emotion and feeling’. She likes the fact that poetry has ‘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’. Out of the Blue is an anthology of poetry written by her between 1975 and 2001. It contains 29 new poems, selections from the award winning children’s book Secrets, and all the poems that Helen wanted to keep in print from her previous books published by Bloodaxe. Her friend, the poet Phillip Goss, helped with the selection. Looking back at her early work, she reflected: To a certain extent… 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. A reviewer of this anthology wrote: Dunmore knows how to draw the reader along with her, to point out things in a way that seems artless until you notice the rhyme scheme, the perfectly right word, the much more that is being said. In 1990, Helen won the Cardiff International Poetry Competition. Helen has selected eleven of her poems to reproduce as part of the Great Reading Adventure. Three poems with a war theme – ‘Don’t Count John Among the Dreams’, ‘Heimat’ and ‘Out of the Blue’ – are in the readers’ guide along with three from her book Snollygoster and Other Poems. A further five poems that were originally published in Snollygoster can be read here (the book is now out of print). Helen aimed to choose poems that can be enjoyed by young people as well as adults, and hopes that they will appeal to a lot of different people. She also tried to choose poems which are various in form, tone, language, subject, length and so on – for example, ‘Baby Orang-Utan’ is a haiku and ‘For Francesca’ used a refrain. Please choose a poem from the selection at the top of the page.