A family cohabits with a horse; three riots are tucked up safely in their beds; a tumbleweed takes up a career in comedy; the giant flag crossing a football crowd has a strange effect on those underneath; a rampaging fifty-foot poem brings terror to a city… As always in Paul Farley's work, the quotidian and the cosmic are braided together in surprising, funny, or disconcerting ways. And as always, his poems inhabit and explore intermediate, uncertain spaces, a fertile terrain found between the obscurity of the cave and the light of knowledge linked to power.
A Farley poem may be filled with recognisable objects and events, but is always alert to wider resonances. This gathering represents a new stage of development in the poet's work, while exemplifying his unwavering faith in the music and shape of language, in the power of metaphorical transformation and a renewal of elegy, monologue, and the pastoral, in the various ways they navigate and intersect with our anxious, brittle age. Paul Farley was born in Liverpool in 1965 and studied at the Chelsea School of Art. He has published six collections of poetry with Picador. His other books include Edgelands (with Michael Symmons Roberts, 2011), and he has also edited a selection of John Clare's poetry. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a frequent broadcaster, he has received numerous awards including Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year, the Whitbread Poetry Prize and the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. When It Rained For a Million Years is his sixth collection. A superb new collection from one of the leading English poets writing today.
