Intimates

Winner of the Forward Poetry Prize and shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, Helen Farish is another success on the Cape List of female poets, including Jean Sprackland and Leonita Flynn. Provocative and tender, passionate yet wary, the highly charged poems in Helen Farish's first collection testify to the complex nature of relationships with lovers, with family and with the self. The love poems explore moments of intense exposure, and within the erotic relation seek to carve out a voice adequate to the expression of female sexuality and desire. Within this framework, the body itself becomes a rich and compelling site of inquiry. Posted throughout the collection like sentinels, poems on the death of the father draw the poet back home where grief mingles with surprising moments of grace or redemption. But whether the encounter concerns sudden loss or sudden blessing, constant throughout is a warm and boldly embodied lyric 'I' voice generously inviting the reader in. Poised at life's mid-point, these haunting, haunted poems negotiate their emotional freight in carefully crafted forms which mediate between exposure and guardedness. Expertly charting the geographies of sex and love, the histories of childhood and grief, Intimates introduces a new poet of originality, honesty and singular power.

About the Author :
Helen Farish has won the Forward Poetry Prize for best first collection and been shortlisted for the T.S.Eliot Prize. She lives in Cumbria and was Poet-in-Residence at the Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere in 2004.

Review :
Can there have been a more arresting opening to a debut collection than Helen Farish's 'Look at These'? Between this and her beautiful closing walk along the Coffin Path, we're treated to a whip-smart, tough lyricism, which is always alloyed by her sense of shape and economy. It's been ages since I've read a first book of poems as bold, carried off with such élan The intimacy of Helen Farish's poems is of an extraordinary kind: at once close to and distant from family and body and thought. The poems are bodily and disembodied, emotionally engaged and detached, passionate and reasoned. Nobody writes with quite this variety of intelligence. Intimates is a stunning debut This is a brave book: it faces up to life at every turn. It celebrates, it laments, it answers back. Helen Farish writes with extraordinary candour, wittily, movingly, with sensuous intelligence Her seemingly throwaway lines let the pain come through because of the subtle expressiveness of her pauses Farish is a sensitive explorer of the nuances of relationships... Intimates is full of evocative atmospheres