The Penny Dropping

Drawing on powerful and universal themes, The Penny Dropping traces the journey of a relationship from first meeting to eventual break-up.

Distance and maturity give retrospective access to moments of revelation which went fatally unacknowledged or unheeded at the time and which now return with an insistence impossible to ignore. But if the penny drops years too late, these poems are their own implicit argument for the value of revisiting our pasts if only in order to acquire a fuller, more complete presence in the now.

Hovering over the collection is Eliot’s final question in The Waste Land: ’Shall I at least set my lands in order?’ And as Helen Farish applies herself to the task, her unflinching yet compassionate voice has never been more in evidence. From the elation of the opening ’Things We Loved’ to the acceptance and humour of ’Of All My Losses’, much is at stake on every page.

Helen Farish was born in Cumbria where she now lives. She has been a Fellow at Hawthornden International Centre for Writers and was the first female Poet in Residence at the Wordsworth Trust (2004-05). She has also been a Visiting Lecturer at Sewanee University, Tennessee, a Visiting Scholar at the University of New Hampshire, and a lecturer in the department of English and Creative Writing at Lancaster University. Her debut collection, Intimates (Cape, 2005), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. She has published three collections with Bloodaxe: Nocturnes at Nohant: The decade of Chopin and Sand (2012), The Dog of Memory (2016), which was shortlisted for the Lakeland Book of the Year 2017, and The Penny Dropping (2023). Helen Farish was also a Writer of the Year Finalist in the Cumbria Life Culture Awards 2017.