Monet's Broom

Helen Farish is the author of five 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), The Penny Dropping (Bloodaxe Books, 2024), and Monet's Broom, published by Bloodaxe in 2026, the artist's centenary year. 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. Helen Farish was also a Writer of the Year Finalist in the Cumbria Life Culture Awards 2017.Her poetry has been included in The Poetry Pharmacy (Penguin, 2017) and The Poetry Pharmacy Forever (Penguin, 2023), as well as in three Forward anthologies, including Poems of the Decade, in Being Alive (Bloodaxe Books, 2004), and two Candlestick Press publications. Regularly published in the TLS, her work has also been published in The Spectator, The London Review of Books, The Guardian, Poetry Review, London Magazine and Poetry London.In 2004-05, she was Poet-in-Residence at the Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere, and she has been a recipient of a Hawthornden Fellowship. In 2024, she was Poet-in-Residence at Cycladic Arts (Greece). Her work has been performed by Helena Bonham-Carter, and the pianist Sarah Gait accompanied performances of poems from her Nocturnes at Nohant: The Decade of Chopin and Sand for BBC Radio 3's The Verb.She completed an MA in Humanities at Oxford Brookes University and was awarded a Studentship to pursue a PhD thesis on the poetry of Louise Glück and Sharon Olds. She spent six months researching 20th-century American women's poetry and feminist theory at the University of New Hampshire and has also been a visiting lecturer at Sewanee University, Tennessee. She taught American Literature and Creative Writing at the universities of Sheffield Hallam (where she was director of the MA in Writing) and Lancaster (where she taught undergraduates, postgraduates and research students). She is now a Poetry School tutor for the North West. After many years elsewhere, she now lives in Cumbria where she was born and grew up.

The fifty-two lyric poems that comprise Farish’s fourth collection of poems showcase her virtuosity in this form. They chart the history of a relationship from first meeting to ultimate dissolution and painful aftermath. The narrator – and there is something almost novelistic about her recollections – looks back, in each poem, from the pre-sent, although Farish is at pains to impress on the reader how insecure a vantage point this is. […] a considerable, harrowing achievement.