So much is at stake in poetry

Helen Farish

Helen Farish was born in Cumbria in 1962, 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 (2004-5). She has also been a Visiting Lecturer at Sewanee University, Tennessee, and a Visiting Scholar at the University of New Hampshire. She lectures fulltime at Lancaster University in the department of English and Creative Writing.

In 2005 Intimates won her the Forward Prize for best first collection and was also short-listed for the TS Eliot Prize. The collection begins with the playfully seductive 'Look at These', which you can hear on this Archive recording. It is a flaunting of female sexuality - a self-conscious exposure performed by the narrator - and makes a lively opening to a book which goes on to be affected by grief, loss, and intimations of mortality. As Steven Earnshaw wrote: 'So much is at stake in Farish's poetry: relationships, self, the fragility in our construction and our passage in the world.'

The group of love poems which follow on from 'Look at These' make clear Farish's interest in female identity. Sexuality and desire are explored in poems whose first person speakers are by turns 'provocative and tender, passionate yet wary.' In 'Feathered Coyote', for example, although the supine naked woman at first sees herself through male eyes as 'a mythical creature, / flowers being made from my hair, / fine grass from my skin,' in the drama which ensues she crucially wrests control of language and of labels which have historically confined her.

The lakes, rivers and fells of Cumbria's Lake District dominate a significant number of the poems in this recording, as do private geographies of lakeland houses loved and lost. In 'Resurrection' the speaker declares: 'Somehow it became everything - / the cobble stone house.' 'To Whiteside' explores the power of childhood experiences of landscape and how they can shape adult longings and loves: 'here was a day / so full of promise that the scent of it / is in me still.'

Farish's language is lucid, musical as the poems open their doors for the reader to enter their softly lit rooms where startling truths are revealed. As Bernard O'Donoghue says: 'Nobody else writes with quite this variety of intelligence.' Farish’s voice is a beautiful medium for these deeply affecting poems.
Helen Farish's Favourite Poetry Sayings:

"'Or was the point always / to continue without a sign?' " - Louise Gluck, from 'Matins'

"'We felt the past; it was, somehow,/ in these things, the front lawn and the back lawn,/ suffusing them, giving the little quince tree/ a weight and meaning almost beyond enduring' / " - Louise Gluck, from 'Quince Tree'

Two of her poems

The Fallen Tree

I take my hat off to you, keswick apple.
On your side since Boxing Day,
on a cold April night I find you in leaf.

After almost a century you are determined
to fruit again, rain healing
your washing line wound.

I take my hat off to you
as I do to my body. After thirty years
bleeding on cue.

Let Me Tell You

about the emptinesses,
life punctuated
so rarely by an event:

that until you stop
looking through them,
even what you have

will fall away
like the sound a crow makes,
pure winter.

Sarah Crown enjoys Helen Farish's assured debut collection, Intimates

Intimates
by Helen Farish
51pp, Cape, £9

Helen Farish's intensely suggestive title is central to the tone and impact of her book, which has won the 2005 Forward best first collection prize. As a noun, it promises secrets and, true to her word, Farish lifts the lid on the minutiae of her life, furnishing her poems with personal possessions ("my father's dressing gown", "the advent calendar / John made me") and unveiling and discussing her body and sexuality. As a verb, however, it hints and alludes, undercutting the simplicity of her physical candour. In the opening poem, the first impression of blithe self-assurance ("Seeing you makes me want to lift up my top, / breathe in and say Look! Look at these!") is subverted by the final line when the speaker retreats into defensiveness, anxiously pleading "Don't tell me not to."

And in the end, it is the thread of anxiety running through these short, smart poems that stays with us. Beneath a shell of brittle confidence, this book is a chronicle of loss. The overarching narrative of the painful, disintegration of a relationship is punctuated by deeply felt poems on the death of her father. With lover and father gone, the most constant presence in Farish's poems is the sea, "this acreage of ocean", which crashes and booms around the collection, loaded with meaning as it is "loaded with summer light", its undifferentiated "matt pewter" surface symbolising the pervasive loneliness pressing in on her.

Farish fills the space left by others with herself. Her emphatic "I" gives her poems focus and force, but their solipsism can at times become overpowering; she's at her best when she looks beyond her immediate surroundings. "Mount Mirtagh and Back", a beautifully imagined love poem which introduces a note of strangeness by opening with the story of "The emperor Qianlong ... obsessed with jade", is one of the strongest in the collection.

Time is a key theme. The poet has reached a point "half way through life" and uses her poems to step outside of time to take stock. "What I feel," she concludes, "is how quickly it will all go." Her fear of passing into the second stage of life - an issue forced by the death of her father - comes over loud and clear. "Lord, protect me / from last times," she begs; but time is passing despite her best efforts to hold on to it, slipping through her fingers "like water refusing to freeze". Rather than retreating from fear, however, she tackles it head on with the strength of character that typifies this collection, concluding with a bitter-sweet four-liner in which she outlines, neatly and brilliantly, her vision of her own ending. "My habit of late-light walking," she says, "will mirror my life, how in its twilight / I'll rush out saying, how beautiful - /has it been like this all day?".

Mishtooni Bose reviews Intimates by Helen Farish

Helen Farish's first collection provokes much thought about the relationship between intimacy and formality. The least confessional of these poems are the strongest. A number of them have been published separately, and it's not hard to see why: 'Treasures', for example, has evident integrity and makes it clear where raw, untranslated confessional ends and a poem - a solid, independent verbal artifact, with definite boundaries, a haughty autonomy, and the courage to be enigmatic - begins. Farish coolly lays out for us a miscellany, including 'the old coach road on a heat-haze night', 'the Ellers' lonning', 'how unremarkable today was', over three stanzas and then reels us in with the last:

These are my treasures, and you
wanted only one of them: me
pulling my dress up, poorer
than I've ever been.

The same assurance that cuts us off here, and leaves us to find out the meaning of the dialect word 'lonning' for ourselves, enables Farish to end the poem just before we're ready to let it go. We are left filling out and finishing the thought, the scenario, with the words still spinning inside us.

The same confidence is at work in 'Auto-Reply', in which Farish updates St. Matthew's reflections on responding to Christ's curt summons. This is another poem that knows how to end:

Looking back it's clear
something had risen to the top.
You walked by, skimmed it off.

The poem solicits nothing from us, and is thus exemplary of a collection in which the best give their readers the least.

The giving or withholding of oneself, and the costs of such decisions, are at the centre of this collection. One traces and retraces what the strongest poems here - 'The White Gate', 'Feathered Coyote', 'Mount Mirtagh and Back' - have begun. 'Mount Mirtagh' looms particularly strongly in this collection as it is here that Farish leaves behind the English landscape familiar to her and works harder at translating her life into quite other terms ('The Emperor Quianlong was obsessed with jade'…).

'Write what you know' isn't always good advice. As 'Mount Mirtagh' shows, apparent estrangement from one's subject matter can release fresher intimacies. There's nothing about 'Look at These' ('Seeing you makes me want to lift up my top,/breathe in and say Look! Look at these!') that couldn't happen outside a poem, and that is also true of 'The Cheapest Flowers', 'Surgery' and 'Familiar Walk'. In 'July', a poem about the days and hours leading up to her father's death, the weight of poetic ambition leads to portentousness, asks the reader too hard, and too blatantly, to share in its sense of the pathos of things. It's instructive to compare the effects of this poem, in which content prevails over form, with what Farish achieves more economically in 'Ten to Midnight', a poem that similarly meditates on the death of 'my Dad, the sailor'; and although Farish can't resist repeating that phrase, not quite trusting her reader to get its point, the poem ripens into something beyond quotidian grief, as form takes over:

…while God's compass
fixed above a hotel bed on a rocky
Italian coastline made me pull away
from my lover crying. Ten to midnight
the crucifix said, ten to midnight.

Again the strength of the poem is in the ending. The desire for intimacy notwithstanding, therefore, Farish is most successful when she has the courage to treat us mean.

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Global Poets’ Motto

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Poetry is Global

Poetry is global
Ever…
Like the functions
And sensing of any
Thinkable being;

From the beginning;
Even before
The birth of tonguable
language.

Poets give
Form, rhyme
Tone , tune
And
A meaning of mirth
With shades of
segregated earth

Now it's time
Come,

let’s gather
Together

To Share our
Nectar from
One tumbler to
Another in
This humbler
Banquet hall

Don’t we
Belong to
The same race
Of solace?
M.S.P.Murugesan
(Editor)
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