Shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize for PoetryAn Observer Book of the YearA 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 disconc...

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 ...

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 chan...

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 a...

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 ...

Read by the author, Paul Farley.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 interm...

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 pe...

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 wi...

‘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

The wilderness is much closer than you think. Passed through, negotiated, unnamed, unacknowledged: the edgelands - those familiar yet ignored spaces which are neither city nor countryside - have become the great wild places on our doorsteps.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 marve...

From Dylan Thomas’s eighteen straight whiskies to Sylvia Plath’s desperate suicide in the gas oven of her Primrose Hill kitchen; from Chatterton’s Pre-Raphaelite demise to Keats’ death warrant in a smudge of arterial blood, the deaths of poets have often cast a backward shadow on their work.The post-Romantic lore of the dissolute drunken poet has fatally skewed the image of poets in our culture. Novelists can be stable, savvy, politically adept and in control, but poets should be m...

While suburbs provide a rich field of research for sociologists, architects, urbanists and anthropologists, they have not been given much attention in literary and cultural studies. The Suburbs: New Literary Perspectives sets out to enrich the limited existing body of critical analysis on the subject with a landmark collection of essays offering a far larger perspective than the books or collections published so far on the topic. This interdisciplinary and wide-ranging approach includes li...