The Dog of Memory

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 dogged 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. Writer of the Year Finalist, Cumbria Life Culture Awards 2017. Shortlisted for the Lakeland Book of the Year 2017.