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Helen Farish

The Dog of Memory

Helen Farish

Publication Date : 29 Sep 2016

ISBN: 9781780373188

Pages: 65
Size :216 x 138mm
Rights: World

Writer of the Year Finalist, Cumbria Life Culture Awards 2017

Shortlisted for the Lakeland Book of the Year 2017

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.

Helen Farish won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. She has also received a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and been shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize.

‘This book is Farish’s third – her debut won the Forward Prize for First Collection – and it is a confident performance. Farish’s poems have balance, and a smiling stride; they take their time (and seldom too much)…. The Dog of Memory is an intriguing offering from Helen Farish, evidence above all of a poet… working out what to do with the strange and beautiful things laid at her feet by her own capacity for recall.’ – Leaf Arbuthnot, Times Literary Supplement

‘Her locations are as varied as you’d expect from a well-travelled, sharp-eyed twenty-first century poet, but her native Cumbria is the source she constantly returns to, slowing the tempo to savour its place-names and define its subtle colours… A rare combination of elegiac feeling, humour, and earthy reminiscence characterises Farish’s poems.’ – Carol Rumens, The Poetry Review [on The Dog of Memory]

‘Helen Farish knows intimately who she is and her beautiful poems capture the intense sadness of memories recalled as the years pass.  The poems are wonderfully, closely crafted.  She is possessed by memory, but it is a memory that is both painful and illuminating.  They are poems which are deeply felt, and though they read as though they draw intensely on her own life, their power to move comes from their reticence, from what is not said, but is deeply understood and quietly acknowledged.’ – Steve Matthews, Cumberland News [on The Dog of Memory]

Nocturnes at Nohant: The decade of Chopin and Sand 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


 

  

BOOKS BY Helen Farish

Nocturnes at Nohant

Helen Farish

Nocturnes at Nohant

The Decade of Chopin and Sand

Publication Date : 28 Jun 2012

Read More   amazon.co.uk
The Penny Dropping

Helen Farish

The Penny Dropping

Publication Date : 25 Apr 2024

Read More   amazon.co.uk

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Helen Farish Readings

Helen Farish Readings

Helen Farish's new collection The Penny Dropping is shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize 2024: Prize readings in London on 12 January 2025. The joint online launch event...

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