Kirjahaku

Provocative and tender, passionate yet wary, the highly charged poems in Helen Farish's first collection testify to the complex nature of relationships with lovers, with family and with the self.

The dog of memory, an animal more often unbiddable and capricious than it is comforting and predictable, roams the landscapes of its choice: not only place, Helen Farish’s native Cumberland and further afield – mornings in Sicily, night skies in Athens – and people, but also the landscape of literature itself which is explored through re-readings of ten authors encountered during her school days. Farish’s doggèd and deeply moving meditation on memory ranges far and wide, but is also weighed against a love of the present whose ‘poise is the pause of a church bell suspended / rim-up after its stroke.’ The weather of snow, which often evokes as well as muffling the past, is replaced by ‘liquefying high-sky heat.’ Rendered in poetry of dexterity and poise, this authoritative third collection takes the reader on a thrilling journey which is lyric, dramatic, enquiring. Writer of the Year Finalist, Cumbria Life Culture Awards 2017 Shortlisted for the Lakeland Book of the Year 2017

'Today, I shall have a few guests, Madame Sand amongst them.' It's December 1836, Paris. Chopin is living on the fashionable rue de la Chaussee d'Antin and the novelist George Sand on the rue Lafitte. But falling in love with Sand also meant falling in love with her ancestral home, Nohant, a manor house set deep in the Berry countryside. In "Nocturnes at Nohant", we hear not only from Chopin and Sand, but also a rich cast of supporting characters who debate, in their sometimes humorous and often surprising way, the relationship between words and music, place and creativity, and the nature of the creative process itself. The powerful love story which threads the sequence together involves spending time not only in rural France, but also Warsaw, Paris, Majorca and Venice. Helen Farish's debut collection, "Intimates", a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 2005. "Nocturnes at Nohant" shows a considerable advance on that achievement, notably with her mastery of voice and narrative.

The Penny Dropping offers an account of a cherished relationship from first meeting to eventual break-up. Distance gives the writer a retrospective clarity from which she does not flinch despite its challenges (‘Look at me’, laments the speaker in ‘Pretty Woman’, ‘stepping back into the dress, / pulling up the side zip, smoothing it down, / as though that’s all it took’). But ultimately poems such as ‘No Point Now’ undo their own argument that the penny has dropped years too late, for in the process of re-evaluating the past a new and altered value is bestowed on it. In ‘Films We Saw at The Phoenix’, the speaker recalls the lovers in one film whose relationship is also at an end, but who look back and ‘spread it out tenderly, the tapestry / of their love which they alone could see.’ The immediate power of these poems is such that much is at stake on every page. Helen Farish won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection for Intimates (2005). Both Intimates and The Penny Dropping were shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize.

When Claude Monet died in 1926 he left behind over three thousand works of art, and in his last decade he was exploring as rigorously as in his early years what a painting could be. Helen Farish’s poems in Monet’s Broom emerge from a deep absorption in the work of this extraordinary artist who revered that most fragile and fleeting of things: the present moment. The inspiration for her collection is wide-ranging, drawing not only on the art itself, but also on the day Monet purchased the land which enabled him to create his water garden; or a photograph of the unvisited Musée de l’Orangerie in the 1930s; or an imagining of the trains which transported his painting materials during the First World War; or the voices of the grainstacks which stood in a field behind Monet’s house and which spoke to him of the ‘mournful kernel at the heart / of all human joy’. When life finally gave Monet ‘a place to bite into’, he moved to Giverny with Alice Horschedé whose powerful voice, along with that of his first wife, Camille Doncieux, threads the narrative together. Published in Monet's centenary year, this ambitious and immensely readable fifth collection from Helen Farish asks searching questions about the creative process and what it means to lead a fully creative life. Two of her previous collections were shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, including The Penny Dropping (2024).