Monet's Broom

Following the artist Claude Monet from his early years in Paris to his death in Giverny in 1926, Helen Farish’s fifth collection, Monet’s Broom, takes the reader from Normandy to the Riviera, from London to Venice as Monet dedicates his life to exploring the ‘artistic ground opening up within himself’. In his desire to forge a new art, Monet demonstrated an unshakeable belief in his own gift, a gift which his first wife, Camille, describes as ‘merciless’: ‘Couldn’t we have had a private moment, / just he and I, for once, not he and I and his art?’ By the time Monet moves to Giverny in 1883, it is Alice, the woman who will become his second wife, whose voice joins Monet’s as together they build a new life. This wide-ranging and immensely readable sequence draws inspiration from a deep engagement with Monet’s life and art, with the circumstances behind the creation of works which millions now visit but which once hung in deserted galleries. In ‘His War Work’, the artist hears the guns of the First World War as he begins his vast water lily panels, at times expressing his grief (‘the brushed-nickel of dusk, / amethyst tree shadows, a dark which proves / the inside of water can be painted’), at other times finding peace in the natural world: ‘the living water / ruffled just now but not by anything / he has thought’.Two of Helen Farish’s previous four titles were shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, including The Penny Dropping (2024).

Helen Farish is the author of five 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), The Penny Dropping (Bloodaxe Books, 2024), and Monet's Broom, published by Bloodaxe in 2026, the artist's centenary year. 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.