The Penny Dropping was short-listed for the 2024 T. S. Eliot prize and was also a Poetry Society Book of the Year.

The T. S. Eliot prize judges (Mimi Khalvati, Hannah Sullivan and Anthony Joseph) praised the collection as ‘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.’

John Field, writing for the T. S. Eliot prize website, said: ‘The candour and courage of The Penny Dropping should not be underestimated. This is confessional poetry of the highest order.’

When selecting The Penny Dropping as a Poetry Society Book of the Year, Moniza Alvi described how she ‘savoured Helen Farish’s tracing of the break-up over time of a loved relationship… Each of the intimate, suggestive single-stanza poems acts as a window in this gripping, elegantly achieved, and ultimately very poignant book.’

Bernard O’Donoghue: ‘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.’

Holly Hopkins: ‘Here are poems with a sense of solidity, magnificently real. The relationship is only part of the story; this is a book about aging, and how memories are continuously overwritten.’ (‘The Little Review’)

Annie Fisher: ‘There is a fluidity and elegance to the writing that carries you along so easily you don’t notice how good it is.’ (‘The Friday Poem’)

David Harmer: ‘A remarkable collection from an excellent poet.’ (‘Ambit’)

Helen has poems included in The Poetry Pharmacy Forever: New Prescriptions to Soothe, Revive and Inspire (Penguin, 2023) and The Poetry Pharmacy: Tried and True Prescriptions for the Heart and Soul (Penguin, 2017). She has also had poems in three Forward Anthologies, including Poems of the Decade.

‘It’s been ages since I’ve read a first book of poems as bold, carried off with such élan.’ Paul Farley

‘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 confidence in their means enable her to speak with convincing directness where other poets might lapse into gestures.’ Sean O’Brien, Sunday Times

‘The poems are bodily and disembodied, emotionally engaged and detached, passionate and reasoned. Nobody else writes with quite this variety of intelligence. Intimates is a stunning debut.’ Bernard O’Donoghue

‘Noctures at Nohant: The Decade of Chopin and Sand is an original and 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.