Monet's Broom

Helen Farish’s poems emerge from a deep absorption in the work of Claude Monet, who revered that most fragile and fleeting of things: the present moment. Published in Monet's centenary year, this ambitious and immensely readable fifth collection asks searching questions about the creative process and what it means to lead a fully creative life.

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).

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