Hold the front page. Re-open the shortlists.
I had seen some poems by Helen Mort and thought this would be a book to get when it came out. Then I saw some others that suggested she might not be quite so much my sort of thing as I had thought. And then The Observer gave their monthly poetry book review to it and convinced me it was one to order. I'm glad it did.
The Complete Works of Anonymous looks to me a poem that could be in most of any forthcoming anthologies of contemporary poetry from hereon in. Any number of poets will be wishing they had thought of it first. It has an immediacy, a sort of 'instant classic' feel to it that some newly heard music makes you think you knew it already and that it had always been there. The poem has, of course, always been there waiting to be written in some theories of aesthetics but Helen was the one who found it.
It is ostensibly an unrhymed sonnet but it has rhyme to be discovered in it and the sort of music that happens when metre and a sensitivity to the sound of words are put together in considered ways.
And that is what happens in many poems throughout the book. The poems stay with you after you've put it down, and, I have found, through the next day, until you go back to look at them again. Some books of poems can congeal into a general idea of what they were like without any of them remaining vivid in one's memory. And rather than performing my own creative writing exercise in a review, like 'the poems seek the otherness in various elsewheres', of which there is far too much to be found in other places, that is all I ever want poems to do to prove their worth, rather like in Larkin's Pleasure Principle or any other common sense approach to the enjoyment of poems for their own sake.
And so I've been thinking of how we are similar to dogs, of fingerprints, of things turning in on themselves and of loose, sub-conscious associations. Not that I don't think of such things already, but grateful for the way these poems have put them.
The divisions indicated in the title are more than the political ones suggested by the photograph on the cover from Arthur Scargill's pet project, the miners' strike of the 80's. There are other social divisions, the ends of relationships and the division between things and their names.
I think it was poems from Scab that I had my doubts about. This set of poems is autobiographical but, beginning at Orgreave, which was before Helen was born, I wasn't convinced of their authenticity until one realizes that it is really about a later dramatic reconstruction of the picket line confrontations. And so we get any number of divisions between her background and her university life, and between the actual events of the miners' strike and the reconstruction of it.
But, as so often happens for me, thematically loaded poems aren't as good as a more abstract idea brought convincingly to life and explained both clearly and slightly waywardly as in the best poems here which are, at their best, very much the sort of thing that makes me think that poetry is second only to music and only tied to words by necessity and somewhat reluctantly.
The fingerprints are in George, Afraid of Fingerprints, a brilliant list of where George might have left his as evidence of where he'd been, either innocently, with later regret or shame.
In The Dogs, Helen has to remind herself that she's 'not a dog' because
I'll not know love like theirs, observed in mute proximity
and if I sometimes sit bolt upright after dark, sensing
a movement in the yard, it's only that I've learned
a little of their vigilance.
It's hard to pick a favourite so soon. This book won't be put on a shelf for quite a while yet. But the way that the idea of fire runs through the 12 lines of Fagan's, with a pub quiz and a relationship's fracture, makes it a miniature masterpiece, ending,
What links the fire of London and the colour blue?
I'm wondering if a match would be enough
or if there's really no smoke without you.
And if the answer to the question did happen to be 'Chelsea' then it is almost too clever and even better than I thought.
But Helen Mort is 28 years old and this is her first book. That isn't particularly relevant except to think that most poets probably produce a better third book than their first was and so anything might be possible.
No pressure, then.
