The Penny Dropping, Helen Farish’s verse-sequence about a love relationship, could be called a page-turner if it weren’t for the fact that every page is a lyric poem of such compulsion that it unfailingly and hauntingly detains the reader’s attention. As a whole, it has all the coherence of a novel, but there is no much more to this beautifully realised lyric collection of the kind that she is a recognised msater of. It is a masterpiece in both forms to a very unusual degree.

Bernard O’Donoghue