Two poets with a shared interest in the nature of creativity come together to read from their new collections at the Lit & Phil, with Helen Farish reading from Monet’s Broom (Bloodaxe Books) and Katharine Towers from The Worrying Rose (Picador).

Helen Farish’s poems in Monet’s Broom emerge from a deep absorption in the work of Claude Monet who revered that most fragile and fleeting of things: the present moment. This is her fifth collection, published in Monet’s centenary year. Two of her previous books were shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, Intimates (Cape, 2005) and The Penny Dropping (Bloodaxe Books, 2024).

Katharine Towers has long been widely acclaimed for the intricate musicality of her poems and for their almost spiritual attentiveness to the natural world. In The Worrying Rose, her fourth collection, Towers invokes the radical act of being still in a world that seems to be dizzyingly out of control. Unfolding from Samuel Barber’s Hermit Songs cycle influenced in turn by the anonymous writings of early Irish scribes and anchorites, The Worrying Rose distils Towers’ thinking about women, creativity and solitude.