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...
Launch reading by Ellen Cranitch, Helen Farish and Brenda Shaughnessy
Ellen Cranitch, Helen Farish & Brenda Shaughnessy launched their April 2024 poetry books with a reading on our YouTube channel. Available to watch now.
The Marché Central at closing time,
men heading home on mint-laden mopeds;
walking up the marble steps to La Poste,
built as though communication was a god;
the Sphinx on a Saturday night,
the one-eyed rose seller, table to table
with the long stems men wanting to impress
bought by the dozen; the knife sharpener singing
outside the open classroom window;
the seamless powdery pastels of the medina;
the call to prayer; the labels in Arabic
glued to your bag before it was thrown
onto the roof of the bus; fish tagine on Fridays;
red and black taxis; the Atlantic at Ain Diab
in one of its opal moods, the football games
on the sands, the ocean thumping down its rollers,
scoring each and every time; the air in Essaouira,
glassine on the first day of spring; harira;
the cinema whose ceiling dripped as if it too felt
the weepy scenes; the slipper souk in Marrakesh,
and those acrobats twisting and looping and hooping
on the street, tumbling and rolling without fear
of what one bad move might mean. We watched
from the restaurant at whose window we sat
and where we must have known
(though we both claimed not to)
what was about to begin.
*
That Route
I remember that time we were driving back home
after visiting friends who had young children and I said
how glad I was we hadn’t gone down that route,
adding a rhetorical ‘Aren’t you?’ I was at the wheel.
Did I make some manoeuvre, switch lanes perhaps,
as a way to breeze past the reply I hadn’t expected?
We were on the M40 on a late November
late afternoon, waning light, rain turning to sleet,
and the weather had been no doubt partly to blame
for why keeping small children happy in a cheerless
south London park had seemed like a fate anyone
would be relieved to have escaped. Tears on the seesaw,
fights on the swings, injuries on the slide, more tears.
But you had smiled through it all, volunteering
piggybacks and peek-a-boo and pushes on the swings.
High Wycombe, Aylesbury, Thornhill Park and Ride.
There were never any tears or fights in our house
until the night, two weeks later, you wept like a child
*
The Penny Dropping
When the penny drops, you don’t drop
a penny, you drop whatever it is
you happen to be holding.
So when the penny dropped
that my mother was dying,
that she was in hospital not to be healed,
but simply to be turned and cleaned
and medicated till she died –
standing there at the nurses’ station, I dropped
the yoghurt pots. I needed all of me:
I needed my hands and my forearms and my shoulders,
I needed my fingernails and my eyelashes,
I needed my cartilage and all my sinews and muscles
in order to bear the understanding, I could not also
bear the weight of the yoghurt
(which in any case my mother had spurned).
And so it was with you, though you happened
to be holding a glass when you understood
that you couldn’t continue, that the moment had come
and it was anguish. I’d looked so happy, you said,
knocking on our front door, both hands
clutching shopping, keys deep in my bag;
I’d looked so happy to see you
when you’d let me in that evening.
For years I didn’t understand how the glass
could have left your hands without your say-so.
I believed there must have been anger, the intent to shock,
or if not, then perhaps while breaking us
you also needed to break something material,
a nothing-thing, just a glass
from which we had both drunk
and which could now be spurned.
*
In Seville That Spring
In Seville that spring you’d fallen
face forward into your food, blacking out
slapstick-style. I remember waiters flapping,
a doctor coming, but we never did get to the truth
of why, what happened in your brain
that you were mildly unwell one moment,
the next unconscious. And it was like that with us –
one minute we were home-making, the next
you were on the floor, couldn’t go on,
you wanted space. I gave you space,
but I should have stayed, sticking to you
like the paella I’d picked from your hair.
I should have made you talk to me,
should have fought for you, stomping my feet,
raising my arms high above my head,
joining my fingertips, teardrop-style.
I should have flounced, shaken and lifted
my skirts like the woman in Seville
singing Por favor, mi amor, por favor.
Instead, British-style, I drove north,
three hundred miles, not even conscious
of the mistake I was making, the life
which wouldn’t be there when I returned.
Contents List
9 Things We Loved
10 In the Balance
11 Taste of Home
12 ‘The Eve of St Agnes’
13 Exposure
14 The Innocence of Pronouns
15 Mozart’s 233rd Birthday
16 Premonition
17 The Sirocco
18 Qui e Li
19 The Halcyon Days
20 Snow on the Road to Naoussa
21 Christ Has Risen! He Has Risen Indeed!
22 Day of Miracles
23 Filling Station, Crete
24 P
25 May Day
26 From the Album
27 Burning
28 Legacy
29 The Right Thing
30 Valentine’s Day
31 Flowers, Baguettes, Fromage, Wine
32 ‘Pretty Woman’
33 A Hundred Days
34 That Route
35 The Butcher’s Boy
36 The Candle Snuffer
37 The Penny Dropping
38 In Seville That Spring
39 Scapegoat
40 That Postcard You Sent from Crete
41 On Approval
42 My Exit
43 Thanking the Universe
45 Fairytale
46 The Waste Land
47 Original You
48 No Point Now
50 Triggers
51 Pasta alla Gorgonzola
52 The Shaman Says
53 How Brilliant Is That?
54 Anniversary
55 Red Circle
56 Hero
57 The Joke
58 Films We Saw at The Phoenix
59 Aftermath
60 Beauty Spot
62 Bringing Things Forward
63 That Selige Sehnsucht Feeling