Mishtooni Bose reviews Intimates by Helen Farish

Helen Farish's first collection provokes much thought about the relationship between intimacy and formality. The least confessional of these poems are the strongest. A number of them have been published separately, and it's not hard to see why: 'Treasures', for example, has evident integrity and makes it clear where raw, untranslated confessional ends and a poem - a solid, independent verbal artifact, with definite boundaries, a haughty autonomy, and the courage to be enigmatic - begins. Farish coolly lays out for us a miscellany, including 'the old coach road on a heat-haze night', 'the Ellers' lonning', 'how unremarkable today was', over three stanzas and then reels us in with the last:

These are my treasures, and you
wanted only one of them: me
pulling my dress up, poorer
than I've ever been.

The same assurance that cuts us off here, and leaves us to find out the meaning of the dialect word 'lonning' for ourselves, enables Farish to end the poem just before we're ready to let it go. We are left filling out and finishing the thought, the scenario, with the words still spinning inside us.

The same confidence is at work in 'Auto-Reply', in which Farish updates St. Matthew's reflections on responding to Christ's curt summons. This is another poem that knows how to end:

Looking back it's clear
something had risen to the top.
You walked by, skimmed it off.

The poem solicits nothing from us, and is thus exemplary of a collection in which the best give their readers the least.

The giving or withholding of oneself, and the costs of such decisions, are at the centre of this collection. One traces and retraces what the strongest poems here - 'The White Gate', 'Feathered Coyote', 'Mount Mirtagh and Back' - have begun. 'Mount Mirtagh' looms particularly strongly in this collection as it is here that Farish leaves behind the English landscape familiar to her and works harder at translating her life into quite other terms ('The Emperor Quianlong was obsessed with jade'…).

'Write what you know' isn't always good advice. As 'Mount Mirtagh' shows, apparent estrangement from one's subject matter can release fresher intimacies. There's nothing about 'Look at These' ('Seeing you makes me want to lift up my top,/breathe in and say Look! Look at these!') that couldn't happen outside a poem, and that is also true of 'The Cheapest Flowers', 'Surgery' and 'Familiar Walk'. In 'July', a poem about the days and hours leading up to her father's death, the weight of poetic ambition leads to portentousness, asks the reader too hard, and too blatantly, to share in its sense of the pathos of things. It's instructive to compare the effects of this poem, in which content prevails over form, with what Farish achieves more economically in 'Ten to Midnight', a poem that similarly meditates on the death of 'my Dad, the sailor'; and although Farish can't resist repeating that phrase, not quite trusting her reader to get its point, the poem ripens into something beyond quotidian grief, as form takes over:

…while God's compass
fixed above a hotel bed on a rocky
Italian coastline made me pull away
from my lover crying. Ten to midnight
the crucifix said, ten to midnight.

Again the strength of the poem is in the ending. The desire for intimacy notwithstanding, therefore, Farish is most successful when she has the courage to treat us mean.

 

Intimates (Jonathan Cape, £9.00)

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