The Penny Dropping

by Helen Farish

Shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2024

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.

Genres: Poetry

64 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 15, 2024

Reviews

[Raegan Allen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ladies STOP paying for overpriced spa treatments!!!! Instead wash your sheets, have an everything shower, and then read The Penny Dropping cover to cover in the aforementioned fresh sheets. You will emerge a newborn babe.

[Mili McCoy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really enjoyed this, particularly the evocation of place in the earlier ‘falling in love’ poems. She hits you a bit over the head with it sometimes, and some of the later poems felt just desperately sad/pathetic to me? Anyway, still a collection I’ve come back to a few times for the feeling of being young and falling in love with a place and person at the same time

[Mauberley]

I read these poems with interest and devotion. The poet creates a beautiful mood, elegiac but not without acceptance. That she maintains that mood so well throughout the length of the book is a testament to her craft.