Interview with Helen Dunmore [UK]:
I asked Dunmore about "With short, harsh breaths", which shares these preoccupations:You keep her letters in a box
and deal them out like patience
to lie on your breakfast table
stamps obsolete, envelope eagerly torn
by the man who once lived in your skin.
It's a tender, empathic piece of writing, and I wondered if the "you" in the poem was based on somebody specific. Dunmore sidestepped that question, suggesting a (perfectly reasonable) reluctance to expose the personal history behind her writing.
"That poem is about loss. Photographs and letters try to give you memory. And you can open a letter that somebody wrote to you 50, 60 years ago, and it's alive on the page, and yet you can't truly access it. It's a very curious feeling when you're handling documents, whether they're to do with your life or other lives. I think it's eerie."
This entry was posted by Ivy
on Wednesday, November 10, 2004 at 11:34 AM.
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