No Map Could Show Them
No Map Could Show Them is an exhilarating new collection from Helen Mort, taking us to the heights of mountains and lacing stories around their peaks. The poems here grapple with huge landscapes, but Mort skilfully picks away at small, quiet moments and lets us focus in, for example, upon a “teardrop” on a mountainscape (‘Miss Jemima’s Swiss Journal’). The poems ask fascinating questions about the relationship between writing and landscape, and between women and walking. Mort asks: how do we record ourselves onto a landscape, how do we write about landscapes, how do we measure ourselves against landscapes and what does it mean to be a human traversing them?
One particular strength of Mort’s second collection is its descriptive imagery. Here, she has found a new language to bring to hills and mountains. Her imagery is challenging, surprising and thoroughly engaging - creating an unexpected world in which the moon is “a fingernail” (‘At Night’), a bay is “a lidless eye” (‘Kalymnos’), and the mountain wind gives “applause” (‘Sherpa’). Mort interestingly inverts the humanly-manufactured and the natural world. This is a place where one might “hurdle the amber moon by accident” (‘Height’) and where the bathroom mirror might be replaced “with a sheet of ice” (‘Home’).
The book begins at great heights, and falls and rises throughout, moving us from the sky to the ground. This has a dizzying and exciting effect. We come down from the mountain to talk about the ordinary, about human moments spent eating “every dripping forkful of cow pie” (‘Beryl the Peril’) and observing the “unspectacular but adequate” days of ‘Prayer’. Mort also gives us many different voices – No Map Could Show Them extends narratives began in diaries or journals as it seeks to provide a continuation of an “abandoned storyline” (‘Dear Alison’). These are the voices of female mountaineers, historical and modern, mocking women’s dress and answering back to patronising males.
No Map Could Show Them is in all a captivating, humorous and touching read. It is an ode to humans being both incredibly insignificant and brilliantly important. It is a song for landscapes: how they alter us, and how we alter them.
No Map Could Show Them is published by Chatto & Windus