Our Collection for September 24. Reasons why we chose this title: Helen appeared at the very first VERVE Poetry Festival back in 2017 giving an wonderful reading alongside Kayo Chingonyi. They re-appeared to headline in 2023 and returned again in 2024 to judge our competition on the theme of eco-poetry. Their list of incredible publications dating back to their 2012 debut Division Street marks Helen as one of the current poets of note in UK contemporary poetry. We were thrilled when Helen brought this personal and experiemental work to VERVE Poetry Press to publish - it is a brilliant combination of lyric poetry and visual text peices involving erasure poetry, as Helen grapples with the difficulty of documenting the impact of her father's stroke and its aftermath on him, her mother and her family. Our Collection of the Month will ALWAYS be a book that we absolutely LOVE. Dad Vs. Dad fits the bill perfectly!
 
In November 2021, Helen Mort’s father had two life altering strokes. altering strokes. Dad vs. Dad is an account of the aftermath of those strokes. In this hardback multi-media pamphlet length collection, Helen Mort combines lyric poetry with visual-text pieces involving erasure poetry made from working with one of her father’s favourite chess books. The effects of a stroke and stroke recovery are documented through the language of strategy and struggle.
 
‘In chess, a move requires a response (until it doesn’t, like the game of life). Check. Check mate. Erasing elements of an existing text, I set arbitrary rules for myself. There is an arrangement here, a sequence, an attempt to find a pattern. Grappling with a text is easy. Grappling with your own altered body and brain is hard. These pages do not reflect my dad’s experience of stroke or my mum’s experience of supporting him in ongoing recovery. They are just a series of movements. They take the time they take (until time takes them).’ – Helen, in her introduction.
 
All royalties earned from this title will be donated by Helen to The Stroke Association. Stroke Association | Rebuilding lives for stroke survivors 
 
‘Precious, pressured, poised poems; another marvel from a marvellous writer, in these poems, Helen’ surefooted searching has illuminated where many stumble. Each poem, a glowing thing, a brightening.’ - Inua Ellams
 
'This pamphlet is a thrilling, radical new direction for Mort’s work; and yet still alive with the heart and precision we’ve come to expect from her work.' - Andrew McMillan 
 
‘Across the black and white split of before and after, pattern and erasure, these poems and images act as a move and response to life-altering events. On this precarious chess board, it is the child who offers the father a ‘steadying hand’. We become aware of other presences beyond the edges: ‘slippers belonging/ to the room’s last occupant’; another ‘who thinks I’m his daughter… I might as well leave with you’.’ - Imtiaz Dharker
 
‘Chess is a binding metaphor here: the afflicted matches wits with his body in pursuit of survival, just as the poet confronts the endgame that awaits us all. These are stirring, piercing poems of intimacy, compassion, and resilience. ‘ - Dan O’Brien
 
‘The lyric texts in this book are beautiful poems in their own right; of grief, loss and love; while the erasure poems speak of severity, choke, trouble, attack. Read together, these poems allow the reader an embodied glimpse into the bewildering messiness, exhaustion, violence, endurance and hope that survivors and family members experience in the aftermath of a stroke.’ - Rachel Bower