Helen Mort, No Map Could Show Them (Chatto & Windus)I once appeared, well above my station, in the pages of PNR. The review that they published, I think by accident, expressed disappointment that Paul Farley's second book didn't seem as good as his first. I've been wary of writing anything too harsh ever since but have found it relatively easy not be be anywhere in the vicinity of Paul Farley, just in case.
No Map Could Show Them follows soon enough upon Helen Mort's fine debut collection, and is dominated by poems about women mountaineers from the first, who hiked up Alps in skirts and petticoats, to more recent climbers. It is a rarefied atmosphere in which these adventurers beyond the obvious have the world at their feet and sometimes go much further beyond it in their attempts. But my first impression was that Helen Mort's language is not similarly ground-breaking. She is down-to-earth and understated in her appreciation of these pioneers but, as we have seen, it might be best not to make that a criticism.
The poems might be wise not to attempt descriptions of blizzards, avalanches and frostbite but take a more considered view of such characters as,
Miss Jemima,
snug in my temperance
and crinoline,
taking chocolate in Grindewald,
the Eiger flashing down
stern looks.
There might be more to be made from such apparent incongruities than there would be from hyperbole and drama. The poems time and again move on and away from their subjects in their last lines, as in Hathersage, the poem that I was first convinced by, where the sun is,
a flashbulb through the branches
taking your photograph
all the way out of town.
which is typical of many of the leavetakings here, leaving a picture but no other trace of itself. And so, the book's title, like the poet's method, is to notice that which is so often left otherwise unmarked.
Black Rocks and the poems that come after it is in memoriam Alison Hargreaves, and not the only one in which we feel a sense of these precarious adventures being life lived on tightropes and precipices, inviting danger that is often glad to accpt the invitation. It becomes an extended metaphor for lives of somewhat less daring.
Lene Gammelgard becomes,
less after than before. You'll never be
what you are now, a silence framed
by sun. You are what's said.
You'll never be what's done.
In what first looks like casual free verse, that which some still say isn't poetry at all, one never has the sense that it is not poetry. It has soft rhythms, natural phrasings and discipline that is well-disguised but artful. It requires more than the first reading to appreciate and my determination not to dismiss it quite so readily as a disappointment was rewarded. The fact that it is anything but overwritten makes the poetry more enduring, not less effective. Lillian Bilocca, who campaigned for legislation following a succession of Hull trawler tragedies, is celebrated, as well as 'difficult women' in Difficult but perhaps the most memorable will prove to be Kiss, in which Alison Hargreaves records in her diary her first kiss with a boy, but not her mountaineering,
your hands clamped to your sides,
and you, for the first time,
not knowing what to do with them.