Film by Helen Dewbery, Poetry by Martin Malone, Soundscape Marc Neys
The Unreturning
“I just think a century’s gone by and we’re somewhere else in the story.”
Glyn Maxwell, On Poetry.
Facing up to the truth of this fact, The Unreturning adopts a neo-modernist approach to problematizing English poetry’s century long love affair with the elegiac trench lyric. Like the early modernists, it too attempts to make all history now in order to suggest contemporary lessons from the failures and accomplishments of the past. And while it is still true that all a poet can do today is warn, the nature of the warning has changed, along with its register. What the poems seek, then, is a transitional idiolect of Great War commemoration for our times. And some form of answer to David Jones’s thought, from the Introduction of In Parenthesis, that:
“It would be interesting to know how we shall ennoble our new media as we have already ennobled and made significant our old – candle-light, fire-light, Cups, Wands and Swords, to choose at random.”
Helen has been researching the notion of there being a type of poetry film that is an actual form of poetry: film verse. Helen is Co-Director of The Big Poetry Weekend in Swindon and co-edits the online poetry film journal Poetry Film Live. Helen is an Associate member of the Royal Photographic Society and approaches poetry film as a contemporary photographic artist, combining still and moving images. Helen has worked collaboratively with a number of poets and has been screened regularly in poetry festivals. She has also exhibited in solo and group photographic exhibitions. Recipient of four Arts Council England grants to develop writing and poetry film projects.
