The deluge of abstract thought in Paul Farley’s sixth collection, When It Rained for a Million Years, flows impressively far and wide. In this startlingly imaginative work, blood runs backwards and language itself has eyes – somehow, each word on the page “looks back, puzzled, like it dwells / on distances – between dip / and driving quill”.
The “distances” these poems span are unremarkable in geographic terms. Farley is fond of scruffy car parks and cooling towers, PO boxes and photocopiers, taxi cabs and chimney stacks. I cannot always follow the beauty he sees in bus timetables or in a study of stacked chairs. But although the height of glamour involves a flying visit to the dismal grey of Heathrow, this subverted play on grandeur only renders his imagery more sublime. In one poem, a flag memorably “shivers like / a bolt of silk on a bed of nails, / or a waterfall in a pantomime”. And while he forages briefly in “the undergloom / where giant fronds of fern grow” in King Carbon, much of his interest lies in the industrial edgelands. It is a stark departure from his previous, avian-themed fifth book, The Mizzy (2019).
