Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #107629 in Books
• Published on: 2002-05-10
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 54 pages

About the Author
Paul Farley was born in Liverpool in 1965. He studied at the Chelsea School of Art. His debut The Boy from the Chemist is Here to See You was published by Picador in 1998. For the last year he has been the writer in residence with the Wordsworth Trust at Dove Cottage.

Customer Reviews

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Fans of Paul Farley have been waiting a long time for this, the follow-up to his amazing first collection, The Boy from the Chemist is Here to See You. So the questions are (1) What's it like? and (2) Is it any good? To which the answers are (1) Different and (2) Yes, you bet. On the minus side there are fewer of those visceral moments when Farley transports you to a different dimension with a well-chosen word or phrase. However, check out his description of a fly encountering a window as a "wall of light" and "the tang of a dream you can't forget/so carry around all day". On the plus side we are treated to a greater insight into what occupies Farley's mind in his waking hours. By his own admission this book is calmer and less pyrotechnic, and what we get is something more personal, philosophical and grown-up, and all the better for it. His concerns and his treatment of them are almost Larkin-esque (albeit Larkin on acid) - even down to a mutual interest in "postal districts" - and range from ornithology and oceanography (fowl and fish) to metereology, evolution, extinction and our frozen pasts. There is at least one instant classic, The Landing Stage, a powerful meditation on his mother's degenerating state of mind. In fact as you read on, these themes interweave so that by the end you feel, as Eddie Izzard says, that it all connects. With Farley it certainly does. The Ice Age is, to use 70s prog rock terminology, a slow burner. It's one I'll be coming back to again and again.