The Penny Dropping

Helen Farish
(Bloodaxe Books, 2024); pbk, £12.00

The Penny Dropping is a compelling narrative-driven poetry collection telling the story of a relationship from beginning to end. This is Helen Farish’s fourth collection of poetry. Previously, Farish has won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, and this is the second time her work has been shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize.

The collection begins with an epigraph from Charlotte Bronte’s Villette: ‘It is right to look our life accounts bravely in the face now and then, and settle them honestly’. This sentiment appears to drive the examination of a relationship throughout the collection. Each poem reads in a distinct narrative form. Farish’s prose poetry style entrusts each poem as a vignette into a distinct moment of the relationship: a ‘long weekend in Marrakech’, a ‘falling out’, and dinner dates. Her poems often centre on unequivocal details from that day, ranging from what they were doing, eating, or wearing, to it being ‘Mozart’s 233^rd Birthday’. ‘Taste of Home’ exemplifies these seemingly arbitrary details well:

You wore it that winter’s day on the Corniche.
Single-breasted, second-hand, pure new wool
in anthracite – a gentleman’s overcoat.[...]
Then you stopped, unbuttoned your coat,
opened it like the wings which were all around us
and folded me inside. We went to that shop
in Ain Diab which sold imported foods –
sometimes all you wanted was a taste of home –
buying a bar of Cadbury’s fruit and nut,
a packet of McVities digestives. I opened both
in the taxi back, saw that they were long past
their ‘best before’, but who cared?
I’d met someone who folded me inside his coat,
who listened and forgave, for me a taste
of something new, something utterly exotic,
more foreign than any of the passing scenery.

Farish provides a distinct image of that day. As she writes in ‘Exposure’, ‘We’d been given carte blanche to wander round — nowhere out of bounds’. While Farish lets the reader in, we are still held at arm’s length, as she leans towards description of the scene, rather than providing anything too overly sentimental. The collection only appears to let the reader into the relationship’s post-mortem, we are not allowed ‘out of bounds’.

The titular poem, positioned just over halfway through the collection, is the crux of the collection. The preceding poems recount the rise of the relationship. In ‘The Penny Dropping’, the speaker recounts the moment the relationship ends. Rather than a ‘shoe’ dropping, the penny is light, small, could easily go unnoticed. This poem recounts the speaker being blindsided by the breakup, and this feeling is compared to the moment they learned their mother was dying:

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 
[...]
standing there at the nurses’ station, I dropped
the yoghurt pots. I needed all of me[.]

The poem then recounts the dropping of a glass by her then partner at their breakup,

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.

Through this extended metaphor, the speaker almost extends empathy to their partner retrospectively as they dropped the glass. This poem stands out from others in the collection— the careful heartbreak on which the proceeding poems hinges.

Most of the collection recounts specific moments in the relationship, providing specific details that appear to let the reader into the heart of the relationship, but the details are perhaps somewhat nostalgic and surface-level, rather than anything too emotional. From every poem I wanted more heart, more emotion, more crushing reflection on what was apparently a meaningful relationship. Yet, the author appears to be too close to say anything objective or too meditative, and at the same time too far away to say anything too passionately.

The poems are technically and formally strong; the author’s formal study of English is evident. However, I wanted more.

Taylor Jeoffroy