DOG OF MEMORY, THE

Writer of the Year Finalist, Cumbria Life Culture Awards 2017

Shortlisted for the Lakeland Book of the Year 2017

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, but also the landscape of literature itself which is explored through re-readings of ten authors encountered during her school days.

Farish’s doggèd and deeply moving meditation on memory ranges far and wide, but is also weighed against a love of the present whose ‘poise is the pause of a church bell suspended / rim-up after its stroke.’ The weather of snow, which often evokes as well as muffling the past, is replaced by ‘liquefying high-sky heat.’ Rendered in poetry of dexterity and poise, this authoritative third collection takes the reader on a thrilling journey which is lyric, dramatic, enquiring.

Helen Farish won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. She has also received a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and been shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize.

‘This book is Farish’s third – her debut won the Forward Prize for First Collection – and it is a confident performance. Farish’s poems have balance, and a smiling stride; they take their time (and seldom too much)…. The Dog of Memory is an intriguing offering from Helen Farish, evidence above all of a poet… working out what to do with the strange and beautiful things laid at her feet by her own capacity for recall.’ – Leaf Arbuthnot, Times Literary Supplement

‘Her locations are as varied as you’d expect from a well-travelled, sharp-eyed twenty-first century poet, but her native Cumbria is the source she constantly returns to, slowing the tempo to savour its place-names and define its subtle colours… A rare combination of elegiac feeling, humour, and earthy reminiscence characterises Farish’s poems.’ – Carol Rumens, The Poetry Review [on The Dog of Memory]

‘Helen Farish knows intimately who she is and her beautiful poems capture the intense sadness of memories recalled as the years pass. The poems are wonderfully, closely crafted. She is possessed by memory, but it is a memory that is both painful and illuminating. They are poems which are deeply felt, and though they read as though they draw intensely on her own life, their power to move comes from their reticence, from what is not said, but is deeply understood and quietly acknowledged.’ – Steve Matthews, Cumberland News [on The Dog of Memory]

Helen Farish is the author of four books of poems, Intimates (Cape, 2005), Nocturnes at Nohant: The Decade of Chopin and Sand (Bloodaxe Books, 2012), The Dog of Memory (Bloodaxe Books, 2016) and The Penny Dropping (Bloodaxe Books, 2024). Intimates, a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. The Dog of Memory was shortlisted for the Lakeland Book of the Year 2017. The Penny Dropping was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2024. Helen Farish was also a Writer of the Year Finalist in the Cumbria Life Culture Awards 2017.

Her poetry has been included in The Poetry Pharmacy (Penguin, 2017) and The Poetry Pharmacy Forever (Penguin, 2023), as well as in three Forward anthologies, including Poems of the Decade, in Being Alive (Bloodaxe Books, 2004), and two Candlestick Press publications. Regularly published in the TLS, her work has also been published in The Spectator, The London Review of Books, The Guardian, Poetry Review, London Magazine and Poetry London.

In 2004-05, she was Poet-in-Residence at the Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere, and she has been a recipient of a Hawthornden Fellowship. In 2024, she was Poet-in-Residence at Cycladic Arts (Greece). Her work has been performed by Helena Bonham-Carter, and the pianist Sarah Gait accompanied performances of poems from her Nocturnes at Nohant: The Decade of Chopin and Sand for BBC Radio 3's The Verb.

She completed an MA in Humanities at Oxford Brookes University and was awarded a Studentship to pursue a PhD thesis on the poetry of Louise Glück and Sharon Olds. She spent six months researching 20th-century American women's poetry and feminist theory at the University of New Hampshire and has also been a visiting lecturer at Sewanee University, Tennessee. She taught American Literature and Creative Writing at the universities of Sheffield Hallam (where she was director of the MA in Writing) and Lancaster (where she taught undergraduates, postgraduates and research students). She is now a Poetry School tutor for the North West. After many years elsewhere, she now lives in Cumbria where she was born and grew up.