Paul Farley Books

An essential selection of poetry from the winner of the Forward Prize and the E. M. Forster Award

Set in a world before Elvis, in a Liverpool before the Beatles, Terence Davies' film Distant Voices, Still Lives is an elegiac and intensely autobiographical meditation on a post-war working-class childhood. This study of the film is both a personal response, as a Liverpudlian and as a poet, and an exploration of Davies' unique visual style.

The new collection from one of the best new talents in contemporary poetry and winner of the 2002 Whitbread Poetry Award

Paul Farley’s keenly awaited new collection is his first since the highly acclaimed Tramp in Flames in 2006. The Dark Film expands Farley’s research into ‘the art of seeing’, and all that humans project of themselves into the world. Farley’s great poetic gift is his ability to switch between the local and the universal, the present and the historical past, with the most apparently effortless of gear changes, bringing to our immediate attention things previously hidden – whether out of sight, in the periphery of our vision, or right under our noses. The Dark Film is a profound meditation on time, on the untold stories of our history, and on the act of human beholding – as well as being Farley’s most richly entertaining collection to date.

A new collection from one of the leading English poets writing today, Paul Farley.

Features Hisham Matar on his father, who was kidnapped while living in Egypt and imprisoned by Muammar al-Gaddafi in Libya; Helen Epstein on 'fatherhood' within the prisons of San Francisco; a dictator who has styled himself as the Father of the Nation; and, Rawi Hage on Beirut, as seen through his father's eyes.