* A Poetry Book Society Recommendation 2016*
'When we climb alone en cordéefeminine, we are magicians of the Alps we make the routes we follow disappear'
The poems of Helen Mort's second collection offer an unforgettable perspective on the heights we scale and the distances we run, the routes we follow and the paths we make for ourselves.
Here are odes to the women who dared to break new ground from Miss Jemima Morrell, a young Victorian woman from Yorkshire who hiked the Swiss Peaks in her skirts and petticoats, to the modern British mountaineer Alison Hargreaves, who died descending from the summit of K2.
Distinctive and courageous, these are poems of passion and precipices, of edges and extremes.No Map Could Show Themconfirms Helen Morts position as one of the finest young poets at work today.
Helen Mort was born in Sheffield in 1985, and grew up in nearby Chesterfield. Five times winner of the Foyle Young Poets Award, she received an Eric Gregory Award in 2007 and won the Manchester Young Writer Prize in 2008. In 2010, she became the youngest ever Poet in Residence at the Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere. Her first collection, DIVISION STREET (2013), was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and Costa Poetry Award, and won the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize. In 2014, she was named as a 'Next Generation Poet', the prestigious accolade announced only once every ten years, recognising the 20 most exciting new poets from the UK and Ireland.