Review - "The Illustrated Woman" by Helen Mort
Helen Mort is an award-winning author based in Sheffield. She has published full collections of poetry, a novel and also writes drama and creative non fiction. She has been shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and Costa Prize and won the Fenton Aldeburgh Prize in 2015. She is a Senior Lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University.
At a more personal level for me, she was Derbyshire Poet Laureate and founded the Spire Writes poetry night in Chesterfield, which I attend.
Helen came as guest reader to Spire Writes in 2022 to read from her latest collection, The Illustrated Woman.
This is a superbly crafted collection, full of concise writing, by turns gentle, fascinating, disturbing, challenging and occasionally wry and humourous. The title and the front cover give a hint about the overall theme of the novel, and the visual images that certainly drive the first section, "skin". Helen herself has a number of tattoos (although not as many as on the cover illustration!) and, through these, she explores her own identity and that of women in general. In particular, she references the women who came before her - her mother, grandmother and her great-grandmother. In the beautiful poem "Precious" she describes the ring that has been passed between those women, wrapped around each of those fingers:
Birmingham bright, silver of the Jewellery Quarter
this ring is the ribcage of my great grandmother,
is the concrete pipes on the building site
where my gran played chicken as a child...
The poems in this section explore society's views of women with tattoos, both now and in the past. Helen writes from a deeply personal perspective yet skillfully brings that perspective to people who aren't inked themselves.
I have to admit a personal liking for a poem in this section, "Love Poem" that is set on the Chesterfield Canal that is not directly linked to tattoos, unless you count painting Fuck Off on a wall as a kind of tattoo. I have walked and run there many times and the images are perfect.
"The Nurse" describes an exquisitly British awkward moment in a clinic as blood is taken.
"On Permanence" is a fabulous prose-poem that closes the section perfectly, explaining without explaining.
The second section, "skinless" takes us on a journey though childbirth and the joys of small children. In "Pip", there's this fabulous stanza
I placed my hand on my stomach
as if I could already feel the growth
inside me, tiny as an orange seed,
a burrowed pip, near-weightless, citrusy.
"Into the Rucksack" takes us to the world of the dad-to-be classes, a sharp piece aimed at men clumsily attempting to empathise with pregant women.
There are so many lovely natural images in this section once it gets to and past the birth - sheep, owls, bears, berries. Too many to even pick a fair selection to show you. Towards the end of the section things turn a touch darker, a portent of what's to come.
The last section, "skinned" opens with a brutal, unadorned sequence called "The Valley" about the porn industry in the US - some of the participants are tattooed, but everything is exposed. The sad story of August Ames, the brutality of the casting couch, the mundane grimness of the porn shoot.
August Ames was found hanging from a tree in LA, a day after getting bullied off social media for refusing to participate in a sex scene with a man who had done gay porn (I had to look this up).
Helen had her own horrific experience with online deep fakes and she covers this expertly in "Deepfake: a pornographic ekphrastic". After these two poems have metaphorically punched you in the gut there's a long prose (prose-poem?) piece about an expedition in the wilds of Greenland. It's empty, beautiful, unsettling and a place the writer can almost, but not quite, escape from the turmoil back home.
Perhaps you have often felt yourself watched. Perhaps you were right.
From a distance you might think she was enjoying herself
The poem Clematis Montana is a heartbreaking poem about her mother - she used to catch little Helen out with the which is heavier - a tonne of bricks or a tonne of feathers? riddle.
She'd laugh. There's no difference. Now her limbs
are tricking her. Her body was a house.
Now it's made of feathers.
The rest of the poems are more reflective and the collection ends with the flawless, tender, love (in its purest sense) poem "Dear Body", that circles back round from "Precious". It describes Helen helping her mum to shower. Their bodies, their skin, reconnecting as they did when Helen was a child. Beautifully written.
Close up, her skin more tanned
than mine, a dark mole
growing on her temple
right where my grandma's is
her elegant, arthritic hands,
garden-blunt fingernails.
The whole collection deserves multiple readings - on each read through you find a line, an image, a thought that eluded you before. It is a serious piece of work, thematically very solid, technically excellent and extremely thought provoking.
"The Illustrated Woman" is published by Chatto & Windus and is widely available online.
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