The Friday Poem on 21st March 2025

Annie Fisher reviews 'The Penny Dropping' by Helen Farish (Bloodaxe Books, 2024).

Flowers, Baguettes, Fromage, Wine

There’s some very Parisian rain
on the Thursday, otherwise it’s the sun
which styles the city. Winter here means
white jeans, ankle boots with heels,
scarves with attitude. Cecile has given us
her attic for the week, with its tribal masks,
wall hangings, chic plants, maps with pins
for where she has been and where
life will take her next. There’s a sloping ceiling
in the bedroom for whoever is on top
to comically hit their head.
Rue de la Boule Rouge, fifth floor, carrying up
flowers, baguettes, fromage, wine.
We are working out who we are now,
as though this is something to be done
every seven years, during which time
our bodies have replaced each and every cell,
so that the ones which bruise when we hit
our heads are not the same ones
which bruised when we first met.
Style it any which way you want,
we are happy, something you put down
to me being myself again. But then you play
(on the wet day) the Well-Tempered Clavier,
the first prelude, those broken chords
in the rain, and I’ve never been so sad
to be happy.

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‘Flowers, Baguettes, Fromage, Wine’ is from The Penny Dropping by Helen Farish (Bloodaxe Books, 2024). Thanks to Helen Farish and Bloodaxe Books for letting us publish it.

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That indefinable ache

The Penny Dropping, Helen Farish’s fourth collection, comprises sixty-seven poems, each written in the first person. It tells the story of a significant relationship from thirty years ago – a relationship which, despite its eventual breakdown, is recalled without bitterness. Instead, there’s a complex mix of emotions – love, passion, tenderness and gratitude, as well as heartache, guilt, regret and much besides. She goes deep, and this review can’t do justice to the subtlety of feeling that reveals itself over several readings. It’s a very personal story but it makes universal connections.

On the surface the poems read straightforwardly. There’s a fluidity and elegance to the writing that carries you along so easily you don’t notice how good it is. Farish’s doctoral thesis was on the poetry of Adrienne Rich, Sharon Olds and Louise Gluck, and their influence is clearly part of the mix, but the writer I was most reminded of was the novelist, Anita Brookner. There’s something Brookneresque about Farish’s lucid, intelligent style. The woman we meet in these poems – a refined, introverted, reflective character who yearns for something forever out of reach – would feel at home in a Brookner novel. In the poem ‘That Selige Sehnsucht Feeling’ (the final poem, and my favourite) Farish describes this sensibility perfectly:

It’s an indefinable ache – not melancholy,
not sorrow, and more sinuous than sadness –
a feeling on a journey, picking up
strands of other like-hearted feelings on its way.
Is it possible to be sick for home while still there?
I think you were saying you missed me
before you’d even left. And yesterday,
as the red sun lowered, picking up other reds
on its way – flame red, orange red, ember red –
I ached for what I was looking at:

‘Selige Sehnsucht’ (blessed longing) is, I think, a reference to Goethe’s poem of the same name, which in turn draws on a parable from Persian poetry about a moth burning itself in a candle flame – a metaphor for self-consuming love*. Hence, I suspect, the sunset imagery in Farish’s poem. Flame imagery features in another piece, ‘Burning’, in which the protagonist watches her lover sleeping under an olive tree and, unbeknown to him, saves him from sunburn:

Let the bees buzz, let the cicadas cicada,
the crickets cricket, for I alone
[…]
know that as the shade moved across you
I saved you from burning by taking off my shirt
to lay it over your bare arm.
Of the woman you fell for after me,
There isn’t the same fire, you said,
as though, despite all my ministrations,
all my care, I’d somehow burned you.

In the Bloodaxe launch of the book (which is fascinating and well worth watching on YouTube **) Farish warns against conflating the ‘I’ and ‘you’ we meet in the poems with the actual people who inspired the work. It’s something poets often say when speaking about autobiographically inspired work. But if the writing is good, it’s natural to suspend disbelief, and I for one couldn’t help but read the book as a true story. It’s full of ‘couldn’t-make-it-up’ details (for example, “I love you two hundred times / on as many squares of loo roll leading to the bedroom”). What’s more, the evocation of place is utterly convincing. We travel quite a bit in these poems (Morocco, France, Italy, Spain, Sicily, Greece) and we feel the vibe. Here’s an extract from the opening poem, ‘Things We Loved’, set in Morocco:

The Marché Central at closing time,
men heading home on mint-laden mopeds;
walking up the marble steps to La Poste,
built as though communication was a god:
the Sphinx on a Saturday night,
the one-eyed rose-seller, table to table
with the long stems men wanting to impress
bought by the dozen; the knife sharpener singing
outside the open classroom window;
the seamless powdery pastels of the medina;
the call to prayer;

It’s filmic writing, and it struck me that the whole book, with its colourful locations, its romance and its heartache, would work wonderfully as a movie – perhaps with piano music as a soundtrack. (Bach gets a mention in two poems: the Prelude in C and the B minor fugue***. Pianist Angela Hewitt is playing the fugue via my laptop as I write. It’s a glorious piece and seems to fit the story well.)

Farish paints the different shades of grief with a fine brush, from the initial dumbfoundedness of being abandoned, through mind-spinning confusion (there’s an excellent traffic-roundabout poem), to an almost-acceptance which finds its expression in poetry. In ‘No Point Now’ she writes:

Yet at the intersection of night
and day, along come these poems,
blowing their horns, waking me
with their own, urgent advice,
half a lifetime too late –
You need to say this to him and this! –
as though no one has told them,
and I haven’t the heart to say,
No point now.

Although each poem stands alone and is worth lingering over, the collection needs to be read as narrative. It is, as the blurb rightly says, a page-turner, and there’s an intimacy and authenticity to the voice that completely sucked me in. I must confess to having almost hostile feelings at times towards the ‘you’ to whom the poems are addressed. Whereas the woman seems to blame herself, for a number of reasons, for the fact that her partner left her for another (“I always had guilt inside, so I knew when I lost him / that it was my fault”), the loved one seemed almost too good to be true – a sensitive, urbane and handsome man who's good with children, can appreciate Keats and knows about the thread-count in bedsheets. Every reader makes their own connection to a book, and it may be that he reminded me of someone I once knew all too well, but I wanted to have a dig at him. I wanted to say to the woman: “You mustn’t blame yourself. After all, he left you! And anyway, he could only play the Prelude in C – even I can play that – you can play the Fugue in B Minor for heaven’s sake!”

And if I were to completely flout the ‘Do not conflate’ rule, I might add: “Plus you’ve won a Forward Prize and been shortlisted for the TS Eliot.”

I’m only half-joking. It is, I think, a testimony to the writing that I wanted to have a conversation with the poet.

“The true subject of poetry is the loss of the beloved,” said Faiz Ahmed Faiz. It’s a good and true subject for Helen Farish too. She handles it beautifully.

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* Selige Sehnsucht (in German)

** Launch reading by Ellen Cranitch, Helen Farish and Brenda Shaughnessy

*** It’s not clear which B minor fugue Farish means but I went for the final fugue from Book 2 of the Well-Tempered Clavier. Here it is, along with its B Minor Prelude:
Bach - WTC II (Angela Hewitt) - Prelude & Fugue No. 24 in B Minor BWV 893

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Annie Fisher’s background is in primary education, initially as a teacher and later as an English adviser. Now semi-retired she writes poetry for both adults and children and sometimes works as a storyteller in schools. She has had two pamphlets published with HappenStance Press: Infinite in all Perfections (2016) and The Deal (2020), and one recently from Mariscat Press: Missing the Man Next Door (2024). She is a member of Fire River Poets, Taunton.

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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 and was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. The Dog of Memory was shortlisted for the Lakeland Book of the Year 2017. The Penny Dropping was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2024. She lives in Cumbria.

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As well as browsing our Substack, it’s worth visiting The Friday Poem website where you can browse our Archive of more than 700 posts dating back to early 2021. If you like Annie Fisher’s writing, try her reviews of Pearls: the complete Mr and Mrs Philpott poems by Helena Nelson (HappenStance, 2022), The Bigger Picture by D. A. Prince (HappenStance, 2022) or Surprising the Misses McRuvie by Eleanor Livingstone (Red Squirrel Press, 2023). If you’d like to know more about Annie Fisher’s poetry, read Jane Routh’s review of Missing the Man Next Door (Mariscat, 2024)

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