Art & Creativity Quote by Helen Dunmore

There’s a quiet audacity in Dunmore’s wish: not that readers will “appreciate” her work, but that they’ll rip through it with the helpless speed of appetite. “Tear through” is almost violent, a verb that refuses the polite, reverent pace often imposed on poetry and literary fiction. She’s aiming for compulsion first, contemplation second. That order matters. Dunmore is insisting that seriousness doesn’t have to announce itself with difficulty; it can arrive wearing the disguise of momentum.

The subtext is a rebuttal to a certain cultural sorting mechanism: “page-turner” gets filed under entertainment, “re-readable” under art. Dunmore wants both, and she frames it not as marketing but as an ethics of attention. If you can’t stop yourself, the book has breached your defenses; it has bypassed self-image and gone straight for nerve. Then the second reading becomes a different contract: the reader returns not out of duty, but because the text has already proved it can reward desire.

As a poet who also wrote acclaimed novels, Dunmore understood how cadence, image, and withheld information can drive narrative the way a beat drives a song. Her line also nods to time as a collaborator: what you “find new” on rereading isn’t only embedded craft, but the way your own life changes the book’s meanings. The ambition isn’t immortality-by-quotation. It’s intimacy by repetition.