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 deluge of abstract thought in Paul Farley’s sixth collection, When It Rained for a Million Years, flows impressively far and wide.
An impressive collection of poems – largely set in industrial wastelands and musing on time and distance – makes the mundane magical.
Farley is fond of scruffy car parks and cooling towers, PO boxes and photocopiers, taxi cabs and chimney stacks.
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.
