Signing Off a Collection – and a Self
A conversation between Helen Farish and Katharine Towers
Helen Farish, Katharine Towers
Katharine Towers: A long time ago Kathleen Jamie wrote an article in The Guardian for a series called ‘Author, author’. The piece begins:
‘For some considerable time after you’ve finished a book, the feeling is as though you’re very slowly falling out of a tree… You think – that’s that… You reach out tentatively for the next thing, the next idea, and all that happens is that you dislodge yourself and begin falling again… To describe it another way: when you finish a book, the self you acquired to write it strolls off site.’
She ends with a Sufi saying:
‘When the work’s finished, you must demolish the workshop.’
All this expresses very well the disconcerting black hole that I fall into when a book is finished. It feels to me as if there is no more to say (ever), and nothing to say it about. I find myself hovering hungrily over the world, hoping to be surprised as soon as possible by the next thing. Hovering is, of course, rather an ugly way of being.
Where are all the interesting and beautiful things I used to notice so easily? I hang strings of words up in my mind to see if they look like the start of a poem. The intensity of the longing makes everything shrivel up.
Helen Farish: ‘The intensity of longing makes everything shrivel up’. This put me in mind immediately of something Louise Glück says in her essay, ‘Education of the Poet’: ‘The desire to make art produces an ongoing experience of longing, of restlessness.’ It follows that the longing and restlessness are going to be at their most acute when you have just signed off a book; one moment you are working so intensively, holding the entire book in your head, and the next it is gone. But the signing off moment is also more complex than that, because whilst I’m anticipating the sense of loss I will feel (there’s almost a period of grieving because you know you will never again enter that particular creative moment), I also remember last time a very real sense of a weight being lifted and an inrush of space. If not the next day, then very soon I was energetically casting about for ‘what next?’ and very quickly found it. But the period of mourning varies – I remember after The Dog of Memory feeling empty for a long time, akin to the ‘black hole’ you describe above. The workshop seemed to have been so thoroughly demolished! To return to Louise Glück, ‘Each book I’ve written has culminated in a conscious diagnostic act, a swearing off.’ The further along the road I go as a poet, the more this resonates with me.
KT: ‘An inrush of space’ – yes, that must be an aspect of the black hole I spoke about. Or perhaps it’s what happens after the black hole. Something to do with the fact that this rather monolithic thing (the book) which has been obscuring the horizon for such a long time is suddenly not there. There’s a new and different light because the long shadow has gone – which is good!
Perhaps finishing a book and thinking and wondering about the Next Thing is an amplified version of what it feels like to be sitting down to write a new poem – anxiety and excitement but most of all (for me) curiosity.
I also find that I’m thinking about the poems in the book I’ve just handed over. There’s nothing more I can do for them now. I wonder whether all of them are truly finished! I think it was Derek Mahon who used to edit poems after they’d been published. My own copies of one or two of my previous books contain pencil markings with little revisions – and if I do a reading this new version is the one I read. It’s something about seeing the poems on a real page – almost as if they were written by somebody else – that shows up things I didn’t see before. Do you feel your poems are set in stone once they’ve been published?
HF: It’s an interesting question. Thinking about it, I realise that, for me, once I’ve signed off the manuscript, the portcullis comes down. It doesn’t stop me looking back at earlier collections and pondering how differently I might now explore the same material, but on the whole that’s an informative exercise, not an exercise in self-punishment! One obvious example would be two poems of mine with the same title, ‘The Butcher’s Boy’. One was published in my first collection (2005) and one in my fourth (2024), both poems exploring the same memory. Granting myself a second stab at opening up that memory was a fascinating exercise which made me contemplate again how it’s all always evolving – one’s poetic technique, one’s sense of freedom as a poet, one’s approach to subject matter. The idea of publication being a staging post is something I find helpful, certainly in terms of letting go of the poems which have come together and magically coalesced into something greater than their individual selves.
You signed off a manuscript not long ago and I’m not far off doing the same, so making the whole cohere is something which is very much preoccupying me. I don’t know how it is for you, but it’s a stage I enjoy more and more (even as I agonise!). There’s a pressure generated in the process which causes poems you’ve long assumed would appear in the book to be squeezed out creating subtle shifts in the light which shines on the poems previously sitting either side of the discarded poem. There’s an immediately identifiable story to this next book of mine (ie Monet’s life and work), but even with collections of individual lyric poems there still has to be a story, a journey, and the art of shaping that journey is as challenging (and pleasurable) for me as writing the poems in the first place. How do you approach the shaping of the whole? And do you find, like me, that otherwise successful poems get sacrificed for the sake of the narrative flow?
KT: Ah yes – the choreography! It’s something that has been particularly interesting in the case of my new book. The Worrying Rose contains a sequence of poems that explore ideas about women and aloneness and creativity. These poems carry an epigraph (Hermit Songs 1, 2, 3 etc.) as they sometimes arise from Samuel Barber’s song cycle of that name.
It may seem hard to believe, but it wasn’t until I had gathered the whole book together that I noticed that similar or related themes are present (sometimes in quite a hidden form) in a significant number of poems that aren’t Hermit Songs. It was as if the book had discovered for itself that it had a shape, and it was for me to find a way of serving (perhaps amplifying) that shape so a reader might experience it too. Some poems had to be slightly tilted so they could draw closer to the themes. And, yes, one or two fell away, as they suddenly seemed to stick out. None of this is really to do with narrative; it’s more like moths gathering around a source of light that has only just been found.
Virginia Woolf talks in her Diaries about not being able to begin a novel until she could feel its whole shape, as if to hold it in her hands. I suppose what I’m saying might be an extension of that idea – that finishing a collection involves finding the shape that will enable the poems to become a coherent (and separate) creature that we can then part with. Perhaps this is a musical principle – the orchestration of themes (and variations) to enable the whole thing to sing as a symphony sings.
HF: I like the idea of poems being ‘like moths gathering around a source of light that has only just been found’, how what you’ve been exploring all along suddenly reveals itself at a moment of its choosing. I’ve also had that experience when I’ve published collections of individual lyric poems where you are given insight as to the overarching subject matter only once you are able to read the work almost as a stranger. But you wouldn’t want these moments of ‘holding the whole in your hands’ to come too soon in the process, I don’t think, because there’s a danger of a self-consciousness slipping in which is the last thing a poet wants. It’s a delicate balance and one I’ve been very aware of with my next book, Monet’s Broom. When you have a theme and a shape for the collection at the outset, my experience is that – to use your idea of poems being like moths – the moths love it! Perhaps it’s the power of the single flame, but numbers of them fly in and the challenge then is to only keep the poems which read as though they don’t know they’re in a sequence. What we always want (both as a writer and a reader) is poems which have no agenda other than to be poems, to make present ‘what we don’t know we know’ (Adrienne Rich).
All of which returns us in a roundabout way to the Katheleen Jamie article you began with in which Jamie describes how difficult she finds it to discuss in a cogent and illuminating way the themes of whichever book it is she’s just published. There was a deep subconscious drive to write the book, but who is she now? This chimes with the novelist Sophie Mackintosh saying that ‘each book changes us in ways that aren’t always apparent at the time.’ We can only be grateful that we have this vehicle for enlarging the self: poetry.
Katharine Towers’ fourth collection The Worrying Rose was published by Picador on June 11th 2026. Her first collection won the Seamus Heaney Prize and she has been shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize.
Twice short-listed for the T S Eliot prize, Helen Farish’s new collection, Monet’s Broom, will be published in 2026 by Bloodaxe. She is a regional tutor for the Poetry School.
