Search results for ""Author Helen Farish""

Provocative and tender, passionate yet wary, the highly charged poems in Helen Farish's first collection testify to the complex nature of relationships with lovers, with family and with the self. The love poems explore moments of intense exposure, and within the erotic relation seek to carve out a voice adequate to the expression of female sexuality and desire. Within this framework, the body itself becomes a rich and compelling site of inquiry. Posted throughout the collection like sentinels, poems on the death of the father draw the poet back home where grief mingles with surprising moments of grace or redemption. But whether the encounter concerns sudden loss or sudden blessing, constant throughout is a warm and boldly embodied lyric 'I' voice generously inviting the reader in. Poised at life's mid-point, these haunting, haunted poems negotiate their emotional freight in carefully crafted forms which mediate between exposure and guardedness. Expertly charting the geographies of sex and love, the histories of childhood and grief, Intimates introduces a new poet of originality, honesty and singular power.

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'Today, I shall have a few guests, Madame Sand amongst them.' It's December 1836, Paris. Chopin is living on the fashionable rue de la Chaussee d'Antin and the novelist George Sand on the rue Lafitte. But falling in love with Sand also meant falling in love with her ancestral home, Nohant, a manor house set deep in the Berry countryside. In "Nocturnes at Nohant", we hear not only from Chopin and Sand, but also a rich cast of supporting characters who debate, in their sometimes humorous and often surprising way, the relationship between words and music, place and creativity, and the nature of the creative process itself. The powerful love story which threads the sequence together involves spending time not only in rural France, but also Warsaw, Paris, Majorca and Venice. Helen Farish's debut collection, "Intimates", a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 2005. "Nocturnes at Nohant" shows a considerable advance on that achievement, notably with her mastery of voice and narrative.

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The dog of memory, an animal more often unbiddable and capricious than it is comforting and predictable, roams the landscapes of its choice: not only place, Helen Farish’s native Cumberland and further afield – mornings in Sicily, night skies in Athens – and people, but also the landscape of literature itself which is explored through re-readings of ten authors encountered during her school days. Farish’s doggèd and deeply moving meditation on memory ranges far and wide, but is also weighed against a love of the present whose ‘poise is the pause of a church bell suspended / rim-up after its stroke.’ The weather of snow, which often evokes as well as muffling the past, is replaced by ‘liquefying high-sky heat.’ Rendered in poetry of dexterity and poise, this authoritative third collection takes the reader on a thrilling journey which is lyric, dramatic, enquiring. Writer of the Year Finalist, Cumbria Life Culture Awards 2017 Shortlisted for the Lakeland Book of the Year 2017

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