‘Lass gives me a home,
a geographic location,
an ordnance survey
grid reference.
I hear my Dad,
Oh lass.’– ‘Calling’
Here you’ll find poems from my four poetry collections, The Penny Dropping (Bloodaxe, 2024), The Dog of Memory (Bloodaxe, 2016), Nocturnes at Nohant: The Decade of Chopin and Sand (Bloodaxe, 2012) and Intimates (Jonathan Cape, 2005).
‘These are intelligent, brave pieces that make you wince and smile.’
Jackie Kay, ‘Books of the Year’
Evening Standard
Explore poetry collections
The Penny Dropping
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 doesn’t not flinch despite its challenges...
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…
Nocturnes at Nohant
It’s December 1836, Paris. Chopin is living on the fashionable rue de la Chaussée d’Antin and the novelist George Sand on the rue Lafitte. But falling in love with Sand also meant falling in love with her ancestral home, Nohant, a manor house set deep in the Berry countryside…
Intimates
Provocative and tender, passionate yet wary, these highly-charged poems testify to the complex nature of relationships with lovers, with family and with the self. Attuned to the expression of a female erotic, the poems speak openly about the emotional and the sexual…