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Helen Charman
Helen Charman is a writer and academic based in Glasgow. Her first book, Mother State – a political history of motherhood — is forthcoming from Allen Lane in 2024. She teaches in the English Studies department at Durham University.

Articles Available Online


Attachment Barbies: On Watching Grey’s Anatomy

Essay

March 2023

Helen Charman

Essay

March 2023

In August 2022, ABC announced that Ellen Pompeo, currently the highest-paid actress on American network television, was leaving Grey’s Anatomy, the show on which...

Book Review

May 2021

HOLDING THE ROOM: ON HOLLY PESTER’S ‘COMIC TIMING’

Helen Charman

Book Review

May 2021

The last poem in Holly Pester’s first collection COMIC TIMING (Granta, 2021) is called ‘Villette’; it shares its title...

https://soundcloudcom/user-856373367/david-hawkins-field-recording/s-oqrsd2iveh1   FIELD RECORDING   When you record the air, its soundings go boneward    A small, ear-sized mushroom collapses upwards into    a state of pure colour and to draw it with sounds    then becoming words is an amiable task A ladybird    lands on your sleeve: it smells brightly,    orange-tipped emulsion, chewing noise until listening pauses: aural history is an opening skull, huge weathered stones left by ancestors    are a broken eminence Could we be its fontanelle?    As a slender membrane sinks like a trampoline    through the filleted sky, so the ear grows into the ground    at the speed of slow echo We want to exist    like humpback whales, let our song gather itself    around the whole world and return the same notes    yet somehow changed by the timbres of distance,    but that sheer blue crow feinting on its updraft    is a new distraction picked from a bucket    of luminous seeds and fungi Before you pack the gear away    please mention the grass growing and the gentle blush    teeming in your cheeks, the near swoop of an eyebrow   https://soundcloudcom/user-856373367/david-hawkins-roadkill-redacted/s-LXwjkvo1TKM   ROADKILL REDACTED   It’s true that I’m the slightly bloated carcase of a young roe deer sprangled on the edge of the central reservation Like something in amber, my legs are a tangled glyph, my face flayed by insects, as traffic iterates and reiterates its sane and modal realism A million flies have drunk from my fraying tear ducts Neutral voids, my eyes; where small nightmares well up and print themselves on tarmac in an abacus of

Contributor

November 2017

Helen Charman

Contributor

November 2017

Helen Charman is a writer and academic based in Glasgow. Her first book, Mother State – a political history...

Essay

May 2020

Where do I put myself, if public life’s destroyed? On reading Denise Riley

Helen Charman

Essay

May 2020

How do you read someone who doesn’t always want to be read? This is a question I used to...

Sally Rooney’s ‘Normal People’

Book Review

October 2018

Helen Charman

Book Review

October 2018

Reading Sally Rooney’s second novel Normal People is a compulsive experience. After the navy blue Faber & Faber proofs were sent out in early...
Rendering intimacy impossible, deploy lifeboats (mark yourself safe) Not listening as such, more waiting to speak, above all mark yourself, it’s so important to be safe Carry on, they demand, we’re not reeling / we are reeling Is this the place for a fountain reference? Probably ‘What first attracted you to your wife, sir?’ ‘Her delicacy / her ankles / her hatred of the Tories’                  Alive twice over but that’s a whole life gone too                you know I’m sorry, he holds his hands up, I’m                sorry, he backs away: my conscience couldn’t                keep company with your body I say, your body?                it just made me think: it’s only a nine month stay   The next time you lay a hand on me, I’ll make a perfect gleaming dive into the Thames Aren’t you glad / to be here? I am
Electioneering

Prize Entry

November 2017

Helen Charman


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Art

August 2016

False shadows

Izabella Scott

Art

August 2016

The ‘beautiful disorder’ of the Forbidden City and the Yuanmingyuan (Garden of Perfection and Light) was first noted by...

poetry

Issue No. 2

Portraits of Pierre Reverdy and Three Poems

Sam Gordon

poetry

Issue No. 2

ANDRÉ BRETON The most memorable thing about our meetings [around 1919-1920] was the almost complete bareness of the room in...

poetry

September 2013

Poems

Osip Mandelstam

TR. Robert Chandler

TR. Boris Dralyuk

poetry

September 2013

Osip Mandelstam was born in Warsaw to a Polish Jewish family; his father was a leather merchant, his mother...

 

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