Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #262626 in Books
• Published on: 1998-04-24
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 49 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Paul Farley has already won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection with this book; he is a rare debutante in that rather than showing promise, he delivers much already. Born in Liverpool in 1965, Farley has a premature nostalgia and seems to have been born an elegist; in a book full of appreciative references to the cinema, he acknowledges: "It's clear I love the footage of the past". But Farley, though tender, is no sentimentalist; witty and precise, he weaves between an affectionate rendering of some of the grittier and unfashionable sides of his city's inhabitants ("the seventies live on in top- floor flats") and a mistrustful, ambivalent embrace of modernity. In "Monopoly", the harmless economic battles of the board game give way to real lives of buildings and work, but it is Farley who loyally remains: "sole freeholder of every empty office space in town, and from the quayside I can count the cost each low tide brings--the skeletons and rust of boats, cars, hats, boots, iron, a terrier". Farley writes with an engaging directness without sacrificing metre and form, his handling of which is, properly, unobtrusively effective. For a young poet to write with wit and intelligence in such an unshowy way, and to avoid the casual cynical use of irony so popular at the moment, is a triumph; here is a writer utterly at home in contemporary culture who treats his milieu with benign, mature scepticism. --Robert Potts

Customer Reviews

Boy from chemist got wrong address!
Having discovered Farley's poem 'The boy from the chemist is here to see you' on the internet I decided to buy his acclaimed debut so that I could have it in print, I was astounded to find that the anthology does not contain the poem ......... no more to add really.

Perfectly astonishing
I was astonished by this debut collection. We expect fledgling poets to pull out all the stops and attempt to dazzle us with their first books, but there's a critical mass of originality in these pages that makes more established poets look lazy and unimaginative. Moreover, and more importantly, there's maturity, an emotional gravitas that sees us through his wildest flights of imagination. Read "Laws of Gravity" or "A Minute's Silence" for examples of poetry using all the resources of heart and intelligence. As a poet I find Farley's talent at once liberating and intimidating. As a reader I'm inexpressibly grateful for such a richly entertaining volume.

Stunning
there are several collections of contemporary poetry that should be sent out in capsules to the universe to show how amazing the human imagination can be, and this is one of them. Non poetry readers might find Farley a touch difficult at first, mainly because his angle of approach is characteristically unusual, and he's not keen to give it all away - the reader is asked to do a bit of imagining as well. But he's by no means obscure. Once you tune into his way of seeing things, the book can be read at one sitting, and unusually for any book of poetry, gets very difficult to put down.