Farish, Helen: The Penny Dropping

Description

Bloodaxe Books, paperback

Publication Date: July 2, 2024

Publisher Marketing: The Penny Dropping traces the journey of a relationship from first meeting to eventual break-up. Distance and maturity give retrospective access to moments of revelation which went fatally unacknowledged or unheeded at the time and which now return with an insistence impossible to ignore. But if the penny drops years too late, these poems are their own implicit argument for the value of revisiting our pasts if only in order to acquire a fuller, more complete presence in the now. The poetry succeeds in being both lucid and luminous without sacrificing its concern with the unspoken, the concealed, with what slid away unobserved during those moments when so much was being decided, futures put in place. Hovering over the collection is Eliot’s final question in The Waste Land: ‘Shall I at least set my lands in order?’ And as Helen Farish applies herself to the task, her unflinching yet compassionate voice has never been more in evidence. From the elation of the opening ‘Things We Loved’ to the acceptance and humour of ‘Of All My Losses’, much is at stake on every page. Helen Farish won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. She has also received a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and been shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize.