The language has got to be fully alive - I can't bear dull, flaccid writing myself and I don't see why any reader should put up with it.

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• Helen Dunmore:

  Poets go through a very tough apprenticeship in the use of words.

• Helen Dunmore:

  My first collection of poems was published by Bloodaxe Books, which was then a very new imprint.

• Helen Dunmore:

  Mourning Ruby is not a flat landscape: it is more like a box with pictures painted on every face. A

• Helen Dunmore:

  It is a violation which has obsessed the tyrants of the twentieth century. They do not want simply

• Helen Dunmore:

  If we understand the past, we are more likely to recognise what is happening around us.

• Helen Dunmore:

  I would like people to come into my Dreamworld and then choose to stay.

• Helen Dunmore:

  I was always influenced by language.

• Helen Dunmore:

  I hope that readers will tear through my books because they can't stop themselves - and then, maybe

• Helen Dunmore:

  I have learned so much from working with other poets, travelling and reading with them, spending da

• Helen Dunmore:

  I enjoy research; in fact research is so engaging that it would be easy to go on for years, and nev