Penny Dropping
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.
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 Glück and Sharon Olds. She has taught at Sheffield Hallam University and Lancaster University, and now lives in Cumbria.