When It Rained For a Million Years

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.

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An eclectic gathering of new work from one of the outstanding English poets of our time.