Helen Dunmore: a tribute

Professor Helen Taylor pays tribute to her friend, the wonderful Bristol writer Helen Dunmore who died last week.

Anyone who had even a casual conversation with Helen Dunmore – poet, novelist, children’s book author and critic, who died on 5 June – knew at once they were in the presence of someone who understood and loved language.

Helen’s verbal exchanges, like her writings and emails, were full of precisely chosen words, careful and original observation, subtle wit and irony. She relished the language she employed so artfully, alive to all its rhythms and nuances. And what a memory she had – for poems, novels, names of flowers and plants, historical and social events, juicy bits of The Archers trivia, and friends’ little health problems that finally paled into insignificance by comparison with her own.

Writers are often expected to keep writing the same book, and when they startle with new subjects or genres they frustrate critics and readers. But Helen Dunmore has carried everyone along with her as she moved between poetry and fiction, and reworked the historical and gothic novel, the spy story, the horror genre and more.

Her eclectic and extraordinary imagination explored in fiction some of the darkest days and actions of unsung people following war, siege and terrible suffering. In her poetry and children’s writing, she gave voice to a delight in the natural and supernatural worlds, expressing a passionate joy in the sea, wild flowers, creatures other than human.

Helen Dunmore published more than 50 books in her lifetime

Helen had a painterly imagination and way of seeing, and in all her writings she makes us see clearly, often painfully, the glory and complexity, as well as the suffering, horror and ugliness, of mundane unrecorded lives. Leningrad and Cornwall’s Zennor came alive under her forensic eye and delicate touch. Ghosts as traces of unrecorded lives haunt her writing, and her keen feminist and liberal conscience imbue her work with moral power and gravitas.

The words many people use about Helen are ‘grace’ and ‘generosity’ and those perfectly capture the woman she was. There was a serenity and elegance about her, a cool beauty and poise, which often made one feel rather lumpen in her presence.

Not that she would have wanted that: always, to friends and other writers, she was encouraging, praising, urging you on to acknowledge and develop your strengths. She gave people undivided attention, concern, fruit cake to eat and little seedlings she cultivated on window ledges. Helen’s kitchen walls are plastered with paintings and poems from her grandchildren. She shared with delight their creative development and wrote stories for them to read, and now to get to know her posthumously .

Diagnosed late with an incurable cancer, she experienced much pain especially in the final months. But, even though many around her felt angry and frustrated at this terrible fate, she herself was stoical and philosophical. All she said to friends was how kind her district and hospice nurses were, how lucky she was to be in her home surrounded by family and creature comforts, and how much she was enjoying gazing out of her window at the changing light over the harbourside, the birds, boats and general hubbub.

In an afterword to Birdcage Walk, her last brilliant novel set in Bristol, she described not knowing she was seriously ill, writing it ‘unconsciously, under a growing shadow…full of a sharper light, rather as a landscape becomes brilliantly distinct in the last sunlight before a storm.’ Cut short at the height of her powers.

Three years ago, she invited seven friends to join a Bristol Poetry Reading Group. We met regularly, reading individual poets or poetry on a theme, and after each session Helen would write a superb summary of and commentary on our discussion. At our last meeting, less than six weeks before her death, she spoke animatedly about Gerard Manley Hopkins, a complex and linguistically rich poet who had influenced her own poetry.  And the only time we glimpsed her inner anguish in those difficult final months was when she faltered while reciting by heart the iconic Robert Frost poem, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, with its resonant final stanza:

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Helen knew she had few miles left before she slept, and the whole group reflected miserably that there would be no more brilliant books, conversations and laughter from this most remarkable woman.

Helen Dunmore poet, novelist, short story writer
December 12 1952 – June 5 2017