Following the exceptional acclaim for his first two books, Farley might have been forgiven for resting on his laurels with his ‘difficult third’ – but Tramp in Flames instead finds him driving his formal ambition and remarkable imagination harder than ever. A book of considerable emotional daring and sometimes Wordsworthian sweep, Tramp in Flames is the work of a meticulous archivist of our cultural memory, and sets the palimpsest of the present hour on a light-box. It also shows Farley rapidly becoming one of the definitive English voices of the age. 'Resonant without being flashy . . . lines that will stick with you for a really, really long time' Mark Haddon 'Funny, observant, brilliantly musical . . . streetwise, erudite, elusive, but very accessible' Ruth Padel, Financial Times 'Farley is one of our most vital and engaging voices. Even a title can twist at the familiar, commanding our attention. He has the knack of both establishing and undermining the securities of memory purely through turn of phrase' W. N. Herbvert, Scotland on Sunday Poetry Book Society Recommendation
‘Look – here’s a poet of ferocious invention, a breathtaking wit that ushers us to epiphanies of grief and laughter, an encyclopaedic knowledge of hip ephemera that’s never merely knowing, and a playful ear – which is, I note, an anagram of Paul Farley . . . What more do you want?’ Michael Donaghy
Some similes act like heat shields for re-entry to reality: a tramp in flames on the floor. We can say Flame on! to invoke the Human Torch from the Fantastic Four. We can switch to art and imagine Dali at this latitude doing CCTV surrealism. We could compare him to a protest monk sat up the way he is. -From "Tramp in Flames" With his free-flowing and musical takes on popular and hidden culture, Paul Farley has emerged in the last decade as one of Britain's most imaginative and formally gifted young poets. He engages with the commonplace and the overlooked, the absurd and the catastrophic, the scientific and the mythic, in ways that make us stop and think again about what it is to be living in this world at this particular time. With The Atlantic Tunnel, Farley is well on his way to becoming one of the definitive English-language voices of the age.
Paul Farley is now widely recognized as one of the leading English poets writing today. As usual it is impossible to summarise in terms of theme, as his interests are too various: there's an air of 'the innocence of childhood' being viewed through the corrective lens of worldly middle age, though, and also of mid-life, its creeping self-consciousness and decrepitude, and the distortions of perception that attend it; confusing encounters with tech, modernity and its accelerated rate of change; satirical excursions critiquing the way business and digital communications have debased language. Farley is also interested as ever in the peripheral and marginal and no-man's lands - the lives of others, and their strange occupations; the birds and unsung-by-the-pocket-guides fauna and flora you miss. 'Selfie with Sea Monsters' encapsulate one of poetry's most capacious and eclectic imaginations.
Paul Farley's great poetic gift is his ability to switch between the local and the universal, the present and the historical past, bringing to our attention things previously hidden. 'The Dark Film' is a profound meditation on time, on the untold stories of our history, and on the act of human beholding.
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. Paul Farley's study of the film is both a personal response, as a Liverpudlian and as a poet, and an exploration of Davies' unique visual style, blending the spaces - the 'short halls, stairways, coal cellars and meter cupboards of northern England' - and sounds - the BBC shipping forecast, a pub sing-a-long, the strains of Vaughan Williams and Britten - of memory.
Paul Farley’s debut collection, The Boy From the Chemist is Here to See You, was one of the most celebrated debuts of the nineties. The poems in The Ice Age are as engaged and engaging as ever, but also display a new philosophical depth: Farley’s gift is to uncover the evidence so often overlooked by less attentive observers, finding – in childhood games, dental records and dog-eared field guides – those details by which we are proven and elegized. The Ice Age will only enhance Farley’s reputation as one of the most formally gifted and imaginative poets to have emerged in recent years.
Good Day! , the critically-acclaimed biography about the legendary Paul Harvey, is now in paperback! In this heartwarming book, author Paul J. Batura tells the all-American story of one of the best-known radio voices in history. From his humble beginnings to his unparalleled career of more than 50 years with ABC radio, Paul Harvey narrated America's story day by day, through wars and peace, through the threat of communism and the crumbling of old colonial powers, through consumer booms and eventual busts.
While suburbs provide a rich field of research for sociologists, architects, urbanists and anthropologists, they have not been given much attention in literary and cultural studies. The Suburbs: New Literary Perspectives sets out to enrich the limited existing body of critical analysis on the subject with a landmark collection of essays offering a far larger perspective than the books or collections published so far on the topic. This interdisciplinary and wide-ranging approach includes literary and art studies, philosophy, and cultural comment. It examines the suburbs across cultural differences, contrasting British, South African and North American suburbs. The specificity of this book therefore lies in a cross-national and cross-continental exploration of these unchartered territories. The suburbs are redefined as those rebellious margins whose geographical borders are necessarily fuzzy and sketch out a common place where cultural frontiers can be transcended. They are, to use Sarah Nuttall’s terminology, places of “entanglement” where contraries meet and where new ways of being in the world is reborn. Seen through the prism of art and literature, the suburbs may then be recognized, as philosopher Bruce Bégout argues, as a “new way of thinking and making urban space.”
Paul Robeson, despite being one of the greatest Renaissance figures in American history, still remains in relative anonymity. An exceptional scholar, lawyer, athlete, stage and screen actor, linguist, singer, civil rights and political activist, he performed brilliantly in every professional enterprise he undertook. Any serious treatment of civil rights history and radical politics as well as American sports, musical, theatrical, and film history must consider the enormous contributions of Paul Robeson. And yet, Paul Robeson remains virtually unknown by millions of educated Americans. People typically know him for only one, if any, of the major successes of his life: the concert singer best known for “Old Man River,” the star of Shakespeare’s Othello on Broadway in the early 1940s, the political activist blacklisted for his radical views and activism during the era of McCarthyism in the 1950s. Paul Robeson For Beginners demystifies and bestows light and long overdue credence to the life of this extraordinary American.
How far can you push a man before he explodes? Postal worker-union steward Paul Farley has battled his sadistic manager for years. Sometimes he wins a grievance; too often he loses. Paul watches as Manager James Newton uses his power to destroy the lives of workers at The Plant. So when Newton is brutally gunned down outside the facility, it's not a surprise when the police arrest the beleaguered union steward whose patience had worn out from losing so many battles with his cruel boss. Is Paul Farley guilty of the crime? Or is he an innocent man facing a life sentence for a crime he didn't commit? Find out in this exciting legal thriller by veteran union steward Paul Felton. Paul Felton was a steward for the American Postal Workers Union in a Local that experienced two shooting incidents in an 18-month period.
From Dylan Thomas’s eighteen straight whiskies to Sylvia Plath’s desperate suicide in the gas oven of her Primrose Hill kitchen; from Chatterton’s Pre-Raphaelite demise to Keats’ death warrant in a smudge of arterial blood, the deaths of poets have often cast a backward shadow on their work. The post-Romantic lore of the dissolute drunken poet has fatally skewed the image of poets in our culture. Novelists can be stable, savvy, politically adept and in control, but poets should be melancholic, doomed and self-destructive. Is this just an illusion , or is there some essential truth behind it? What is the price of poetry? In this book, two contemporary poets embark on a series of journeys to the death places of poets of the past, in part as pilgrims, but also as investigators, interrogating the myth.
This book opens from the viewpoint of a four year old child who sees his father leave to fight in World War II and how it affects him. After the war our family moves into a new subdivision made up of all manner of WW II vets. Our house neighbored a five acre dairy farm. When the farm owner dies, the widow makes a bad decision that causes an invasion of rats. After a battle with the rats, the widow begins boarding horses which we were allowed to ride in exchange for caring for them. Our family fell into hard times in the mid-50's, the house was sold, and a move took place to a rural town (Arnold, Mo). The move occurred at a time which placed the author in a unique historical event, the graduation of Fox High School's very first senior class. After Graduation the author served three years in the U.S. Army, twenty six months of it in Germany. He was in Germany when the Berlin Wall was built It was also while the author was in Germany that the he received Jesus Christ as Savior. This book goes on to show what a Radical and beautiful change that Jesus makes in the Author's life to give it meaning and purpose.
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