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).
However, what fascinates me most of all is Farley’s meditation on the millennia-old question of time. What is time, where does it go, and what do we do in its long shadow? The “distances” covered in When It Rained for a Million Years are most surprising in a temporal sense. In The Workaround, our speaker emails the eighth century, hoping to take an illuminated leaf from Bede’s book. Fast forward to the present day in The Gorilla and we are sitting awkwardly in a Zoom waiting room, suspended from reality and its usual ticking reminder. “Here in the lobby, in limbo, waiting to gain / entry [ …] Time is out of joint”. The concept bends in his hands like a bough in the wind and miraculously never seems to break.
Whether asking the bank for an overdraft or losing a wedding ring, buying a new computer or reading the small print on a tin of peaches, the speaker has a gift for making the mundane seem magical. Even his ode to bubble wrap is far from banal – each plastic air pocket becomes a perspective-shattering pause. He calls them “spots of time” after William Wordsworth, who wrote about the small but significant moments that shape a human life. As each bubble is popped and pouf! it is gone, Farley reminds us of the brevity of existence, before the sharp distraction of fried bread draws us back down to earth.
There is a strong metaliterary thread to these poems as we meet a range of literary figures, from Ovid to John Clare as he escapes from the asylum and stops to eat grass. While this tale is based on the true feat of Clare walking 100 miles home over four days with no money, reduced to eating roadside grass which luckily he found as tasty as bread, I enjoy the moments where Farley plays with a little more poetic licence, and gladly accept the provocation to reimagine Oliver Twist trudging down the M62 in Close Reading.
I am both amused and alarmed by the riotous literary rebellion in Attack of the Fifty-Foot Poem. Despite its defecating hero, a creature that criticises the sheer monstrosity of creative expression, Farley’s poetry – like each “word” he works “loose / from its sweet wrapper” – simply remains a delight to consume. The acrobatic leaps in Farley’s imagination make for a thrilling ride, and, as in Great Northern Diver, “sends a ripple through your heart”.
When It Rained for a Million Years by Paul Farley is published by Picador (£12.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
Great Northern Diver by Paul Farley
Listen. Big divers calling at twilight,
home for their annual refit on a sea loch,
bobbing like grids of floats that cage
salmon in their farms, or mark a wreck,
breaking the silent routine of night
coming on. Say what you like,
there are no words. Say it’s where birdsong
begins. Say you’re standing at the edge
of this water when the world was young.
Say it breaks the surface of our age.
Say it stands us in the middle of things.
Say it overdubs the sound of what’s
to come – not tonight, but soon – and sends
a ripple through your heart. It’s not
all about you… Say it’s where birdsong ends.
