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.

About the Author

Helen Farish is the author of four books of poems, Intimates (Cape, 2005), Nocturnes at Nohant: The Decade of Chopin and Sand (Bloodaxe Books, 2012), The Dog of Memory (Bloodaxe Books, 2016) and The Penny Dropping (Bloodaxe Books, 2024). Intimates, a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Both Intimates and The Penny Dropping were shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Her PhD thesis explored the work of Louise Gluck and Sharon Olds. She has taught at Sheffield Hallam University and Lancaster University, and now lives in Cumbria.

Reviews
The Penny Dropping, Helen Farish's verse-sequence about a love relationship, could be called a page-turner if it weren't for the fact that every page is a lyric poem of such compulsion that it unfailingly and hauntingly detains the reader's attention. As a whole, it has all the coherence of a novel; but there is so much more to this beautifully realised lyric collection of the kind that she is a recognised master of. It is a masterpiece in both forms to a very unusual degree. -- Bernard O'Donoghue
This book is Farish's third - her debut won the Forward Prize for First Collection - and it is a confident performance. Farish's poems have balance, and a smiling stride; they take their time (and seldom too much).... The Dog of Memory is an intriguing offering from Helen Farish, evidence above all of a poet... working out what to do with the strange and beautiful things laid at her feet by her own capacity for recall. -- Leaf Arbuthnot * Times Literary Supplement *
Her locations are as varied as you'd expect from a well-travelled, sharp-eyed twenty-first century poet, but her native Cumbria is the source she constantly returns to, slowing the tempo to savour its place-names and define its subtle colours... A rare combination of elegiac feeling, humour, and earthy reminiscence characterises Farish's poems. -- Carol Rumens * The Poetry Review [on The Dog of Memory] *
Helen Farish knows intimately who she is and her beautiful poems capture the intense sadness of memories recalled as the years pass. The poems are wonderfully, closely crafted. She is possessed by memory, but it is a memory that is both painful and illuminating. They are poems which are deeply felt, and though they read as though they draw intensely on her own life, their power to move comes from their reticence, from what is not said, but is deeply understood and quietly acknowledged. -- Steve Matthews * Cumberland News [on The Dog of Memory] *



Book Information
ISBN 9781852249960
Author Helen Farish
Format Paperback
Page Count 64
Imprint Bloodaxe Books Ltd
Publisher Bloodaxe Books Ltd
Dimensions(mm) 234mm * 156mm * 7mm