The Penny Dropping

In The Penny Dropping Helen Farish demonstrates how memory, and the act of writing a poem, can both distort and make sense of the past, writes John Field

The Penny Dropping, Helen Farish’s fourth collection, views a relationship through the distorting, grieving lens of memory. An individual poem might account for a bad day, but this book-length sequence articulates the challenge of carrying on when the world has been upended. The confessional tone of these elegiac, stoical poems speaks to the human condition. Farish’s ‘I’ is also us – the human spirit endures with courage, dignity and humour.

‘Things We Loved’ opens the sequence at the beginning of the relationship, in Morocco. It is rendered in technicolour as light plays across the Atlantic ‘in one of its opal moods’ and the medina is dusted with ‘powdery pastels’. It’s a breathless list, running over 27 lines, with just two full stops across the whole poem. Even reading this feels like a whirlwind romance. Memory – the act of writing a poem – constructs the past in this way, but whether experience did follow experience in this relentless manner we cannot say. In ‘The Halcyon Days’, the unexpected warmth of winter is ‘gifted by Zeus’ – a Classical god, fickle and fictitious. The speaker acknowledges that those days ‘have acquired / the quality of myth’ and, as myth, the original experience is buried beneath layers of archaeology.

‘A Hundred Days’ counts the distance between the couple’s final holiday and their break-up. Given the title, we’re invited to view the relationship as geopolitical, as historical – fated, inevitable and tragic. The speaker tells us that she’s ‘always loved the title of that film about Anne Boleyn, / Anne of a Thousand Days.’ We see that her own number is reduced by a factor of ten. Our lives may be little, but that doesn’t stop them feeling like affairs of state. The couple visit the chateau at Ancy-le-Franc, hindsight casting its pall on the playfulness of their ‘posing like kings and queens / haughty on the roomy velvet chairs’. ‘[T]he photos of our last holiday / are full of fun, mischief even’ – but photos are their own myth-making, an archive of our best selves, and are not the place to look for an objective history. The final line of this one’s cut short: ‘I had a hundred days left. A hundred days, / and then the axe fell.’ The poem’s levity sharpens the blade of this violent severing.

A later poem, ‘Triggers’, returns to the listing seen in ‘Things We Loved’, a sense of loss triggered ‘Every time I eat Pasta alla Gorgonzola; / every wedding I’ve been to’. The absolutism of ‘every’ makes a prison of the wounded mind, where grief finds new outlets, builds fresh associations. The serendipity of ‘a stag sleeping / outside my kitchen window’ would bring joy to most lives but, ‘When I returned / he’d vanished’, and, once again, the labyrinth of memory reconfigures, revealing the minotaur of loss and grief at its heart.

‘The Joke’ presents the speaker as an older woman, a whole lifetime away from Moroccan sand and sweat, but still travelling to hotels with a photo of her love at her bedside. The staff think: ‘Her son, how handsome’ but the speaker’s still addressing the absent second person: ‘You are frozen in the photo at twenty-four, / and I am sixty’, imagining him as in on the joke, but the question remains who the joke is really on. Like memories, the man in the photo is frozen, incorruptible – and this is a sign of sanctity: the exhumed corpse smelling of roses and miraculously undecayed. The speaker says: ‘I pat you on the head each time I pass’. Time, it seems, has transformed her from lover to mother, from fellow traveller to venerator of a saintly icon.

Memory is fragile. As we cultivate and reinforce it, we create a myth which interacts with the details of daily life, transforming it into one huge shrine. The candour and courage of The Penny Dropping should not be underestimated. This is confessional poetry of the highest order.

Helen Farish’s The Penny Dropping (Bloodaxe Books) is shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize 2024. John Field blogs at Poor Rude Lines.