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Following the artist Claude Monet from his early years in Paris to his death in Giverny in 1926, Helen Farish’s fifth collection, Monet’s Broom, takes the reader from Normandy to the Riviera, from London to Venice as Monet dedicates his life to exploring the ‘artistic ground opening up within himself’.
In his desire to forge a new art, Monet demonstrated an unshakeable belief in his own gift, a gift which his first wife, Camille, describes as ‘merciless’: ‘Couldn’t we have had a private moment, / just he and I, for once, not he and I and his art?’ By the time Monet moves to Giverny in 1883, it is Alice, the woman who will become his second wife, whose voice joins Monet’s as together they build a new life.
This wide-ranging and immensely readable sequence draws inspiration from a deep engagement with Monet’s life and art, with the circumstances behind the creation of works which millions now visit but which once hung in deserted galleries. In ‘His War Work’, the artist hears the guns of the First World War as he begins his vast water lily panels, at times expressing his grief (‘the brushed-nickel of dusk, / amethyst tree shadows, a dark which proves / the inside of water can be painted’), at other times finding peace in the natural world: ‘the living water / ruffled just now but not by anything / he has thought’.
Two of Helen Farish’s previous four titles were shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, including The Penny Dropping (2024).
'It is a virtuosic interrogation of the relationship between lyric and narrative time… Farish keeps alive the immediacy of the vanished present by meticulous relocation of ‘You’ and ‘I’ in space and time… The Penny Dropping is the best love poem anyone has written in years.' – Mimi Khalvati, Anthony Joseph and Hannah Sullivan, T.S. Eliot Prize 2024 Judges
‘I savoured Helen Farish’s tracing of the break-up over time of a loved relationship in The Penny Dropping. Each of the intimate, single-stanza poems acts as a window in this gripping, elegantly achieved, and ultimately very poignant book.’ – Moniza Alvi, The Poetry Society (Books of the Year)
‘The candour and courage of The Penny Dropping should not be underestimated. This is confessional poetry of the highest order.’ – John Field, T.S. Eliot Prize reviewer