Bøker av Helen Farish

Drawing on powerful and universal themes, 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.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's third collection is preoccupied with narratives from the past. The dog of memory roams the landscapes of its choice: not only place, Farish's native Cumberland and further afield - mornings in Sicily, night skies in Athens - and people, but also the landscape of literature itself.

Second book from Farish, whose debut collection, Intimates (Cape, 2005), was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. This is a thematic collection of poems exploring the lives and love of Chopin and French novelist George Sand.

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.