When It Rained for a Million Years

the new collection from the Forward Prize-winning poet

By: Paul Farley

Narrated by: Paul Farley

Read by the author, Paul Farley.

A family cohabits with a horse; three riots are tucked up safely in their beds; a tumbleweed takes up a career in comedy; the giant flag crossing a football crowd has a strange effect on those underneath; a rampaging fifty-foot poem brings terror to a city… As always in Paul Farley’s work, the quotidian and the cosmic are braided together in surprising, funny, or disconcerting ways. And as always, his poems inhabit and explore intermediate, uncertain spaces, a fertile terrain found between the obscurity of the cave and the light of knowledge linked to power.

A Farley poem may be filled with recognisable objects and events, but is always alert to wider resonances. This gathering represents a new stage of development in the poet’s work, while exemplifying his unwavering faith in the music and shape of language, in the power of metaphorical transformation and a renewal of elegy, monologue, and the pastoral, in the various ways they navigate and intersect with our anxious, brittle age.

Critic reviews

You can never predict how – or where – a Paul Farley poem is going to land . . . he has his own wit and singular insights

Startlingly imaginative . . . The acrobatic leaps in Farley’s imagination make for a thrilling ride, and [. . .] “sends a ripple through your heart"

Farley's strength, throughout his career, is the delicacy of his poems' music, their soft lighting and good humour, and this book is no exception