The Penny Dropping offers an account of a cherished relationship from first meeting to eventual break-up. Distance gives the writer a retrospective clarity from which she does not flinch despite its challenges ('Look at me,' laments the speaker in 'Pretty Woman', 'stepping back into the dress, / pulling up the side zip, smoothing it down, / as though that's all it took. ').
But ultimately poems such as ' No Point Now' undo their own argument that the penny has dropped years too late, for the process of re-evaluating the past bestows on it a new and altered value. In 'Films We Saw at The Phoenix', the speaker recalls the lovers in one film whose relationship is also at an end, but who look back and 'spread it out tenderly, the tapestry / of their love which they alone could see'. The immediate power of these poems is such that much is at stake on every page.
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.
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The Marche Central at closing time,men heading home on mint-laden mopeds;walking up the marble steps to La Poste,- Things We Loved
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(@BloodaxeBooks, 25 April 2024, e-galley, 80 pages, ARC from the Publisher via @edelweiss_squad)
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This is my first time reading the poet. I really enjoyed The Penny Dropping. I loved the title of the collection and this is why I wanted to read it in the first place. The poems all chart the course of a relationship from first meeting until it all falls apart, universal in scope. I really connected with this collection and it helped me remember my own relationships and break-up's, one of which I've written a fair amount of poems about myself. The poems resonated for me, especially Things We Loved, The Halcyon Days, May Day, The Right Thing, and the title poem. I'd recommend this.
