Paul Farley

Bringing together fiction from some of the city’s most celebrated writers, The Book of Liverpool traces the unique contours that decades of social and economic change can impress on a city. Set against key historical moments from the Second World War to the Capital of Culture year, these stories question what ‘belonging’ and ‘home’ mean in the Liverpudlian context, from the regenerated city centre to satellite suburbs, from the sparring cathedrals to the no-go concrete housing estates. Liverpool emerges in these short stories as a city in constant flux: haunted by ghosts, buoyed up by myths, and shifting with an ebb and flow like the Mersey itself.

'Farley's strength, throughout his career, is the delicacy of his poems' music, their soft lighting and good humour, and this book is no exception' – Poetry Book Society BulletinA 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 Farley poem may be filled with recognisable objects and events, but is always alert to wider resonances. When It Rained for a Million Years represents a new stage of development in the poet’s work, while exemplifying his unwavering faith in the music and shape of language, and in the power of metaphorical transformation in the various ways elegy, monologue and the pastoral navigate and intersect with our anxious, brittle age.'A gift for making the mundane seem magical' – Observer

Paul Farley is now widely recognized as one of the leading English poets writing today. As usual it is impossible to summarize in terms of theme, as his interests are too various: there’s an air of ‘the innocence of childhood’ being viewed through the corrective lens of worldly middle age, though, and also of mid-life, its creeping self-consciousness and decrepitude, and the distortions of perception that attend it; confusing encounters with tech, modernity and its accelerated rate of change; satirical excursions critiquing the way business and digital communications have debased language. Farley is also interested as ever in the peripheral and marginal and no-man’s-lands – the lives of others, and their strange occupations; the birds and unsung-by-the-pocket-guides fauna and flora you miss. The Mizzy encapsulates one of poetry’s most capacious and eclectic imaginations.

The post-Romantic lore of the dissolute drunken poet has fatally skewed the image of poets in our culture. What is the price of poetry?In this book, two contemporary poets embark on a series of journeys to the death places of poets of the past, in part as pilgrims, but also as investigators, interrogating the myth.

Paul Farley is now widely recognized as one of the leading English poets writing today. Selected Poems takes stock of a singular talent of great formal gifts: for readers new to his work, this is an ideal and generous introduction, drawing on four collections from his acclaimed debut The Boy from the Chemist is Here to See You to his most recent, The Dark Film. Farley is a cultural archivist, a nostalgist of the darkest and most unsettling kind, and a meticulous curator of those fleeting details which define our lives and times most poignantly: he already reads like one of the poets by whom future generations will know us best. His Selected Poems is a marvellous introduction to one of poetry’s most capacious and eclectic imaginations.

The Dark Film, Paul Farley’s first collection since the highly acclaimed Tramp in Flames, expands the poet’s research into ‘the art of seeing’, and all that humans project of themselves into the world. Farley’s great poetic gift is his ability to switch between the local and the universal, the present and the historical past, with the most apparently effortless of gear changes; he brings to our immediate attention things previously hidden – whether out of sight, in the periphery of our vision, or right under our noses. The Dark Film is a profound meditation on time, on the untold stories of our history, and on the act of human beholding – as well as Farley’s most richly entertaining and rewarding collection to date.

In the same way the Romantic writers taught us to look at hills, lakes and rivers, poets Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts write about mobile masts and gravel pits, business parks and landfill sites, taking the reader on a journey to marvel at these richly mysterious, forgotten regions in our midst.

Elleve dikt om og fra Liverpool, og om og fra steder i Liverpool. Hus, rom, hushjørner, busstopp, fotballstadion, elvebank, pub. Paul Farley (f. 1965) skriver det man kalle hverdagslige dikt, hvor natur og populærkultur er like naturlige ingredienser – «en sterk formell selvbevissthet med en vilje til å skildre hverdagslivet», som det heter om Farley i bokas forord. Vi får med andre ord bli med poeten hjem, til byen hans, til fotballbyen, til oppveksten, til familien, til alt som en gang var nært og derfor er det ennå. Paul Farley jobber i dag som professor ved universitetet i Lancaster, og er av flere blitt tippet som øyrikets neste poet laureate.Som et spesialkomponert «bonusspor» – «Noen noter om Scouse» – gir Farley oss en liten innføring i scouse-begrepet som er en naturlig hyllest innenfor bygrensene og naturlig sjikane utenfor.Gjendiktet av Charles I. Armstrong.

Following the exceptional acclaim for his first two books, Farley might have been forgiven for resting on his laurels with his ‘difficult third’ – but Tramp in Flames instead finds him driving his formal ambition and remarkable imagination harder than ever. A book of considerable emotional daring and sometimes Wordsworthian sweep, Tramp in Flames is the work of a meticulous archivist of our cultural memory, and sets the palimpsest of the present hour on a light-box. It also shows Farley rapidly becoming one of the definitive English voices of the age. 'Resonant without being flashy . . . lines that will stick with you for a really, really long time' Mark Haddon 'Funny, observant, brilliantly musical . . . streetwise, erudite, elusive, but very accessible' Ruth Padel, Financial Times 'Farley is one of our most vital and engaging voices. Even a title can twist at the familiar, commanding our attention. He has the knack of both establishing and undermining the securities of memory purely through turn of phrase' W. N. Herbvert, Scotland on Sunday Poetry Book Society Recommendation

Set in "a world before Elvis, in a Liverpool before the Beatles", Terence Davies' film "Distant Voices, Still Lives" is an elegiac and intensely autobiographical meditation on a post-war working-class childhood. Paul Farley's study of the film is both a personal response, as a Liverpudlian and as a poet, and an exploration of Davies' unique visual style, blending the spaces - the "short halls, stairways, coal cellars and meter cupboards of northern England" - and sounds - the BBC shipping forecast, a pub sing-a-long, the strains of Vaughan Williams and Britten - of memory.

Paul Farley’s debut collection, The Boy From the Chemist is Here to See You, was one of the most celebrated debuts of the nineties. The poems in The Ice Age are as engaged and engaging as ever, but also display a new philosophical depth: Farley’s gift is to uncover the evidence so often overlooked by less attentive observers, finding – in childhood games, dental records and dog-eared field guides – those details by which we are proven and elegized. The Ice Age will only enhance Farley’s reputation as one of the most formally gifted and imaginative poets to have emerged in recent years.

‘Look – here’s a poet of ferocious invention, a breathtaking wit that ushers us to epiphanies of grief and laughter, an encyclopaedic knowledge of hip ephemera that’s never merely knowing, and a playful ear – which is, I note, an anagram of Paul Farley . . . What more do you want?’ Michael Donaghy