Paul Farley’s Selected Poems came out from Picador in 2014.
He operates out of unremarkable premises. The smell of peardrops comes from the spray-and-body shop. On the other side it’s paintball: NEMESIS.
Come in. Please be careful. Mind your step. He keeps them in the dark. It stinks, I know. Like a stable or a paddock. Perspective slackens like an ankle rope
in a gallery. Carpets sleep off the world, digesting its flash and glamour, its...
When the cutting edge was a sleight, a trick of time, we blinked our way through Jason and the Argonauts, thrilled by the stop-motion universe, its brazen Talos grinding like a Dock Road crane, and the Hydra’s teeth sown into studio soil by Harryhausen, who got between the frames like a man who comes in bone dry from a downpour by stopping the world and snapping out a path...
One for the money. Arrangements in green and grey from the window of an empty dining-car. No takers for this Burgundy today apart from me. I’ll raise a weighted stem to my homeland scattering by, be grateful for these easy-on-the-eye, Army & Navy surplus camouflage colours that seem to mask all trace of life and industry; a draft for the hidden dead, our...
Why should poets’ deaths carry more weight than those of others? David Markson’s litany of deaths, This Is Not a Novel, starts off with a poet’s death (Byron’s) and...
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