When It Rained for a Million Years by Paul Farley

A family cohabits with a horse; a pine marten narrates its own wildlife documentary; a man is betrothed to a reed bed; the giant flag crossing a football crowd has a strange effect on those under it; a desperate migrant falls from the sky; 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, the 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 recognizable 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.