The Tall Lighthouse

Helen Mort                   

 

 

Helen's poems are tender and intriguing, filled with subtle

yet memorable images. She writes with an easy maturity and is a welcome new presence.Helen was born in Sheffield and grew up in Derbyshire.She received an Eric Gregory Award in 2007 and won the Manchester Young Writer prize in 2008.

publications:

a pint for the ghost

the shape of every box

£5

ISBN 978 1 904551 73 7

with paypal

a pint for the ghost is a sequence inspired by South Yorkshire legend:a night-time encounter with the ghosts of worked out mines, smoky pubs and deserted highways.

For more info, visit: www.apintfortheghost.blogspot.com

'This is an exciting collection from a writer who knows the value of the past, and how to set it against the present to illuminate them both.'

                                                                                                     Ian McMillan


a chaser for miss heath (from 'a pint for the ghost')

 

At seventy, our dance mistress

could still perform

a perfect pas des chats.

 

Her French was wasted

in the north. We stood in line

repeating parr-durr-shat

 

or sniggered

as she waited in the wings,

her right hand beating time

 

against her hip, her eyes

avoiding ours. She never

made the stage.

 

It took me twenty years

to understand. Alone tonight

and far from home

 

in shoes that pinch my toes

until they bleed, my back

held ballerina straight,

 

I wait as she did, too afraid

to walk into a bar

where everyone’s a stranger.

 

I almost see her glide

across the city night

to meet me, tall and white

 

and slim. A step behind,

she clicks her fingers. Elegant,

she counts me in.

£3

ISBN 978 1 904551 29 4

the shape of every box by helen mort

in this eagerly anticipated debut volume helen presents us with twenty engaging poems of people and place. Her poems are tender and intriguing, filled with subtle yet memorable images. She writes with an easy maturity and is a welcome new presence. Helen was a winner of the Foyle Young Poets Award on five occasions from 1997 to 2004

with paypal


the shape of every box captures Helen Mort in the incipient process of distilling her own distinctive brand of desire. Entwined around love and the stillnesses of observation, these poems bind tenaciously to sensation even as their tendrils sway in elusive, sometimes surreal, air. Mort's limpid diction contrasts well with her slant takes on narrative and emotion, the poems rarely allowing us to settle but, rather, developing and complicating their effects on our palate of thought.
                                                                                                              Mario Petrucci