a pint for the ghost by Helen Mort
tall-lighthouse – www.tall-lighthouse.co.uk
ISBN: 978 1 904551 73 7, Paperback: £5.00, 42pp
Five-times winner of the Foyle Young Poets Award, recipient of an Eric Gregory Award, winner of the Manchester Young Writer Prize and with a debut pamphlet the shape of every box (tall-lighthouse 2007) behind her, Helen Mort is clearly a poet from whom much is expected and this, her second pamphlet, doesn’t disappoint.
Written in part as a performance piece of the same name, it takes the form of seventeen poems about ghosts, the origins of which she discusses at www.apintfortheghost.blogspot.com This aside, though, her foreword alone makes clear the roots of her interest: “Whenever I think about poetry … I’ve always found myself coming back to the idea of ghosts: people and places we once knew, characters we’ve never met, stories we overhear and wish were ours. I’m fascinated by those ghosts and how a poem can reinvent them, encounter them in unlikely places”.
Not that Mort is simply a teller of fireside tales. On the contrary, her poems resonate with echoes and memories of a wider, deeper past, the landscape of her childhood, perhaps, her sense of its importance in illuminating her present, distilling her sense of what she wants her poetry to represent. She says as much in the haunted and haunting after hours: “I belong / to starless nights: / the six black boulders / up at Harthill moor who dance / like women till the cockerel crows / and morning freezes them again.”
Typically, the language here is deceptively simple, absolutely clear and that incantatory phrase, “I belong”, repeated at the beginning of each stanza, goes to the heart of what is good about the entire collection: its sense of identification with a lost world of people and places, skills and trades, valued bygone ways brought back to life, as in a vodka for the working ghosts, through memories and words: “Have pity, then, on long-dead steelworkers, / whose curse confines them to the northern quarters … or pace beside the working girls / who don’t look up … for evermore, at home, and helpless in this town …”
Making poems out of pasts we haven’t lived can be dangerous for poets; our writing becomes twee and sentimental, deteriorates into nostalgic goo. Mort, however, avoids this trap. Though often darkly moving, her ghosts aren’t sentimental. She knows well enough that, however precious, the past is another country where Time’s already been called and the poet herself has become a ghostly watcher: “And I know / even before I’ve passed / the butcher’s shop, the corner store, / the park’s black railings, / slick as spears, I know / that when I reach my parents’ house / it will be overgrown / with waist-high nettles, choked / by ivy, hidden by thorns.”
An exciting collection, one I’d enjoy writing about at greater length. Not to be missed.
… reviewed by Ken Head