Poet: Paul Farley

The new collection from one of the best new talents in contemporary poetry Paul Farley’s debut collection: The Boy from the Chemist is Here to See You was one of the most highly acclaimed in recent years. It won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection;a Somerset Maugham Award and was shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Award. In 1999 he was named as the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year. His collection was described as ‘a stunning debut’ by the Sunday Times.

The Ice Age sees Farley extend his range to embrace a new and philosophical seriousness. His 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 elegised. Formally deft and dizzying in its variety, The Ice Age will consolidate Farley’s reputation as one of the most imaginative and enduring poets to have emerged in recent years.

Paul Farley has been widely and justly praised for his extraordinary knack of casting the contemporary experience in an almost mythic and historic light, and following the exceptional acclaim for his first two books, Farley might have been forgiven for resting on his laurels for his third. Tramp in Flames, however, finds him pushing his imaginative daring and formal ambition to the limit. A book of astonishing variety and range and no little emotional bravery, Tramp in Flames shows Farley rapidly becoming one of the most unfailingly interesting writers of any genre, and a definitive voice of the age.

Paul Farley’s keenly awaited new collection is his first since the highly acclaimed Tramp in Flames in 2006. The Dark Film expands Farley’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, bringing 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 being Farley’s most richly entertaining collection to date.

In this collection of poems, the author can be found speaking in the voice of a light bulb, a hungover window-cleaner, a photographer trapped in a condemned block, and a deranged collector of vinyl.