Helen Farish, The Dog of Memory (Bloodaxe)I realize that I've been lured in by a marketing ploy. I've bought the album on the strength of the single, like I did with the Orange Juice album on the evidence of Rip It Up or like those thousands who bought a hip-hop album about gang warfare on the basis of Killing Me Softly and found themselves with a Fugees CD they didn't like.
Pastoral is a tremendous poem, its terza rima redolent of summer in a lost England, tactile but supremely confident and adept in its own chosen discipline and a compact store house of vivid images and phrases that provide more than many an average book of poems might in its entirety.
I said if Helen Farish's next book is full of poems like this then I will be first in the queue for it. And then I was looking through the almost infinite mentions of prizes, competitions, slams, poets-in-residence and general poetry activity in Poetry News that somebody kindly passed on to me and there it was, a new book by Helen Farish.
Of course not all the poems in it are as glorious as Pastoral. There is not a poet alive that can maintain quite such a standard of masterpieces throughout a whole book and there's not many dead, either. There is, however, a poem called Allington Cross, that brilliantly associates the moment of
the pause of a church bell suspended
rim-up after its stroke, mouth open
with that endlessly possible feeling of a poised summer's day caught quietly and restfully expanding into eternity.
Pastoral does a similar thing but the other way round, accumulating detail of the 'coppery evening, the mayor having dined', 'church towers whose flocks/ of pigeons grow sleepy', and the bee that sashays through town; and the meads; and Allhallowtide. I don't believe for one minute that a poem like this came as naturally as the leaf to a tree but sometimes hard work is worth it and the prosody, the considered rhythm, pace and elucidation of this and many other poems in the book, don't look like the unnatural product of a workshop, too much time spent adjusting or anything too overwrought. It is a 'considered utterance' and is there for the reader to enjoy the measured consideration that the poet has put into it. Poems that achieve such difficult ambitions quite so well don't turn up very often.
Rain, always evocative for the poet, recurs as a motif throughout the collection, as do memories of childhood, Cumbrian roots and a sense of gratitude. The bus to Oualidia is a moving in memoriam with its
bus that never rusts,
I flag it down still, saving you a place
There is much else to admire in Daughters of a suicide, Tea-time at my aunt's and elsewhere but I have reservations about the poems predicated on other books, mainly C19th literature- Jane Austen, the Brontes, Hardy, Wordsworth, there are several of them - I'm not convinced they do much more than demonstrate that Helen has read those canonical titles and successfully empathized with the characters in them. But one would be doing well to find any book that one approved of entirely with the need to make a collection 'full length', the urge of poets to write poems and the industry demanding more 'product' from such over-worked, sensitive souls.
I'm glad of having been sold such a book on the speculative taster of the best poem to appear in the TLS in the last six months. I'd have been sorry to have missed it. It belongs in any anthology that claims to represent what is still worthwhile about poetry and still being written. Such things make the whole enterprise something to keep investing in.