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.

When Claude Monet died in 1926 he left behind over three thousand works of art, and in his last decade he was exploring as rigorously as in his early years what a painting could be. Helen Farish’s poems in Monet’s Broom emerge from a deep absorption in the work of this extraordinary artist who revered that most fragile and fleeting of things: the present moment. The inspiration for her collection is wide-ranging, drawing not only on the art itself, but also on the day Monet purchased the land which enabled him to create his water garden; or a photograph of the unvisited Musée de l’Orangerie in the 1930s; or an imagining of the trains which transported his painting materials during the First World War; or the voices of the grainstacks which stood in a field behind Monet’s house and which spoke to him of the ‘mournful kernel at the heart / of all human joy’. When life finally gave Monet ‘a place to bite into’, he moved to Giverny with Alice Horschedé whose powerful voice, along with that of his first wife, Camille Doncieux, threads the narrative together. Published in Monet's centenary year, this ambitious and immensely readable fifth collection from Helen Farish asks searching questions about the creative process and what it means to lead a fully creative life. Two of her previous collections were shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, including The Penny Dropping (2024).