Helen Farish, The Penny Dropping

 Helen Farish, The Penny Dropping (Bloodaxe)

Helen Farish wrote the officially best poem I've seen of the C21st and, although it's a lot to expect that she might also write the second and third best, that is sufficient reason to buy her new book. Not the fact that it was on the T.S. Eliot Prize shortlist.

It is a 'verse-sequence', a term that gives me a sinking feeling even though there's nothing ostensibly wrong with it. I staunchly maintain that there's either a collection of poems or there's a long poem in sections and there's no need of the 'sequence' in between but it's a long cherished dogma that gets me nowhere, like the way that coffee and golf seem to make me irrationally cross. What The Penny Dropping most resembles is the Birthday Letters of Ted Hughes, and I might even suggest that a sequence would have such a generalized title, or like Duino Elegies, rather than take a poem's title for the collection although I can see that the theme of the whole book is the 'penny dropping' that the long-term relationship is profoundly over. 

So, whereas the much-loved Pastoral was a technical tour de force and these poems attempt no such artistry and one wonders at 54 pages of poems mourning one relationship, I'm not going to be easily convinced but it does what it does with an accumulating amount to like and even admire about it.

I'd be the first not to insist that poetry has to be metrical or rhyme but a corollary of that is that it must do something and Helen's poems often work on loose extended metaphors, like The Waste Land about a soft toy polar bear called Eliot that she gives away to a child and then misses in the same way as she misses the ex-partner.

They were well-travelled, Helen and the beloved, and so cities abroad give a feeling of displacement, whether exotic or alienating and the partnership has elements of domestic togetherness before the loss of estrangement. 

Triggers lists a number of occasions that might have brought the past to mind but it's a 'bog standard Tuesday' that the more compelling young stag comes into her garden and sleeps, then 'drifts off' herself before he vanishes. There is a parallel with being 'cheated on' and a more powerful trigger. Then, in The Shaman Says, it's some sort of compensation that,

I almost feel sorry for your wife

who only has you for the remainder

of this lifetime, this poky little corner

of the twenty-first century. 

That's not quite as generous as the tone of most of the book which does much to celebrate and memorialize what there was and objectifies the self-pity into something much more than the mawkish threnody it could easily have become. It's a tribute to the writing that we don't feel that's what it is. If Donne is praised for the ingenuity of his many seductive arguments, there's as much to be said for how many approaches to this form of bereavement are compiled here.

I'm not sure how hard it is by now to be judged one of the ten best poetry books of the year. We are no longer in a competitive golden age although there might be some circularity to the point that I don't think so so I'm not looking hard enough to find what might be going on. It's not easy to form an opinion of things you don't read but The Penny Dropping confirms that if you know where to look there are still good things to be found and that Helen Farish maintains her place in the diminishing list of poets whose books I gladly buy.