Recovering a Body - Softcover

Dunmore, Helen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1852242892 ISBN 13: 9781852242893

Publisher: Bloodaxe Books Ltd, 1994

Synopsis

One morning a woman wakes up and finds her body has disappeared. She tries revenge on her lovers, solitary celibacy, marriage and magic as she struggles to get it back. Another woman watches a clump of cells that will be her next baby swim towards her like a space-ship on an ultrasound scan. A third strips naked to bathe in the cold waters of Balnacarry. These powerful poems express the loneliness, comedy and pleasures of life in the body. They explore sexuality and the huge changes of pregnancy and age=ing. They ask what it is really like to think, feel and write 'with two hearts beating inside me'. Women have often been told they must choose between children and artistic creativity. Helen Dunmore challenges the falsity of that choice, as her fifth collection of poems appears at the same time as her new baby.

About this title

About the Author

Helen Dunmore (1952-2017) was a poet, novelist, short story and children’s writer. Her poetry books received a Poetry Book Society Choice and Recommendations, the Alice Hunt Bartlett Award, and the Signal Poetry Award. Bestiary was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize in 1997. Inside the Wave won the 2017 Costa Poetry Award and went on to be named Costa Book of the Year. She won first prize in the Cardiff International Poetry Competition in 1990 with her poem ‘Sisters leaving the dance’, and first prize in the National Poetry Competition in 2010 with ‘The Malarkey’. After making her debut with The Apple Fall in 1983, she published all her poetry with Bloodaxe. Her earlier work was collected in Out of the Blue: Poems 1975-2001 (2001), which was followed by Glad of These Times (2007), The Malarkey (2012), and Inside the Wave (2017), her tenth and final collection. A new retrospective, Counting Backwards: Poems 1975-2017, was published by Bloodaxe in 2019. She published twelve novels and three books of short stories with Penguin, including A Spell of Winter (1995), winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction, Talking to the Dead (1996), The Siege (2001), Mourning Ruby (2003), House of Orphans (2006) and The Betrayal (2010), as well as The Greatcoat (2012) with Hammer, and The Lie (2014), Exposure (2016) and Birdcage Walk (2017) with Hutchinson. A posthumous story collection, Girl, Balancing and Other Stories, followed from Hutchinson in 2018. Born in Beverley, Yorkshire, she studied English at York University, and after graduating in 1973 spent two years teaching in Finland before settling in Bristol.

Edition details

• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books Ltd
• Publication date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1852242892
• ISBN 13: 9781852242893
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 64