
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
£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