The Dog of Memory

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 mediation 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. 'Intimates is a passionate book. Its theme is ancient (the unthinkable pain of lost love) and Farish thinks hard about both pain and happiness. Much of Farish's art lies in concealment. The economy of her poems and her con?dence in their means enable her to speak with convincing directness where other poets might lapse into gestures' – Sean O'Brien, Sunday Times '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