Helen Farish

A borrowing

Over time my memory relocated us

to Palace Green. Perhaps it required

a dramatic backdrop, the open air

the library’s Short Loan desk lacked.

You wore a striped blazer in an ironic way.

I wore a long black dress, though it was spring

and the night that lay ahead perfumed

by the freesias you bought as we walked

up Claypath, you on short loan, something

my memory is powerless to change

except by not returning you.

*

My Casablanca

He threw me in the air and said

What a brilliant idea! I loved being

an idea, like all ideas weightless,

and therefore easy to throw

into the air hanging about

the door to his apartment.

I wonder where I got the courage

to cross the city and surprise him,

why I wasn’t like my mother waiting

for a partner at the dance?

I’ve never been very content

to hang about, but I could have stayed

(brilliant) in the air

he threw me into forever.

*

Allington Cross

I keep thinking how we wait all year

and possibly longer (because not every summer

contains such days) for such days.

Because when summer is at its height

its poise is the pause of a church bell suspended

rim-up after its stroke, mouth open.

At Allington Cross the whole landscape

was a bell mouth open, ah, the luminous

untrammelled now of it, rim-up and poised.

And paused at the crossroads in the liquefying

high-sky heat, I thought of the composer

who cycled round and round the square

so as not to miss a note of the broadcast symphony.

*

The dog itself

Memory rounds this up, breathless,

like the dog herding sheep

below the bedroom window:

dropped at my feet are smells –

wool in the rain, my aunt’s

cigarette smoked on the hoof,

gorse also, firs making green

(and what it all means,

that too has a smell).

Not forgetting the dog itself,

so pleased with its work,

I must pen it in quick.

I

11 A borrowing

12 My Casablanca

13 Allington Cross

14 Palermo, da capo

15 Missing the rain

17 Jane Eyre, a sequel

22 Underground city

23 The dog itself

24 Pancake Day

25 De Bottelier, Bruges

26 L’homme tranquille

27 Pastoral

28 Elizabeth and Darcy go walking out

29 Storm, Bavaria

30 Athens

31 A goddess, a city and a tree

II

35 Calling

36 Judgement Day

37 Tea-time at my aunt’s

38 In deep

39 Cahier

40 La Pergola du Parc, Casablanca

41 Rough Guide to Vienna

42 The death of Doctor Zhivago

45 HMS Affray

46 Cavafy’s suitcase

47 Moon x 6

48 Cumberland, 1974

49 Twelfth Night: or, What You Will

50 Shift

51 Winter toad

52 Still life

53 The Market Gardener’s Tale, 1953

56 What you once owned

57 The bus to Oualidia

58 Aftermath

59 Daughters of a suicide

60 Saving the ladybird

61 Tess has a word with Hardy

62 Angela

63 Six hen pheasants in my garden last Tuesday

64 In Rainsbarrow Wood

III

67 Complimentary calendar

68 How to make pasche eggs

70 Fallen apple tree

71 Let me count the ways and the times I’ve walked round Buttermere

72 Custodian

73 The Old Chancel, Ireby

74 Reading the label

75 The thing itself

76 Friday night at the Sphinx

77 The glow

78 Low Lorton ¼  High Lorton ¼ 

79 The monkey clock

81 A life in geography

82 In the Austrian Museum of Applied Arts

83 Remanence

84 Literacy lesson

REVIEWS OF NOCTURNES AT NOHANT:

‘A delicate collection which winds differing melodies into a truly lovely, if quiet, narrative, melding reality and fiction seamlessly.’ – Jennifer A. McGowan, Orbis, on Nocturnes at Nohant

‘A sustained feat of imaginative recreation,’ – Keith Richmond, Tribune

‘Sometimes light-hearted and sometimes solemn, the potency of these poems lies in their beautifully observed details.’ - PBS Bulletin

‘Nocturnes at Nohant is an original extremely intelligent working through of a complex relationship between two artists and their work. I loved the poems. The sequence works so well as a story and is so nuanced I felt completely absorbed in it. And full of admiration for Farish’s great skill.’ – Melvyn Bragg

REVIEWS OF INTIMATES:

‘A whip-smart, tough lyricism, which is always alloyed by her sense of shape and economy. It's been ages since I've read a first book of poems as bold, carried off with such élan.’ – Paul Farley

‘Intimates is a passionate book. Its theme is ancient (the unthinkable pain of lost love) and Farish thinks hard about both pain and happiness. Much of Farish’s art lies in concealment. The economy of her poems and her confidence in their means enable her to speak with convincing directness where other poets might lapse into gestures' – Sean O’Brien, Sunday Times

‘Farish uses the first-person speaker with a moving immediacy – as often in the poems that address the death of her father – or deploys it with considerable inventiveness and ingenuity… Intimates is an intensely lyrical work. Farish is adept at conveying a moment of being in a handful of pared, precise images, and she can sometimes astonish with a single line' – Jane Griffiths, TLS

‘A debut poetry collection by a poet whose voice is already mature, assured and at times very funny' – Claire Harman, Evening Standard

‘These are intelligent, brave pieces that make you wince and smile’ – Jackie Kay, Sunday Herald Books of the Year

‘Helen Farish writes with extraordinary candour, wittily, movingly, with sensuous intelligence.’ – David Constantine