Poems from LRB, New Yorker, Poetry Review, TLS, etc. Titles include Starling, Goldcrest, Lark, Linnet, Song Thrush, Robin, Moorhen, Sparrowhawk, Long-Eared Owl, Nightjar, Mistle Thrush, Curlew, Tree creeper, Gannet, and Great Black-backed Gull.
It starts slowly, then there's "Accumulator". The narrator's father is studying the racing news, though it could be poetry - the horses' names, etc. I don't get the ending (he runs through the house when he wins?) or the "makes nothing happen" allusion. I like "Song Thrush" - the narrator watches "it bash a snail like its gavel and leave a broken home" (not entirely original), then the shell becomes a sea-shell, then a phone. He gets up to speed with "Water Nymph at a First Generation Magnox Storage Pond", the best poem in the book, though a little too long.
"The Sloth" has a form, but the details puzzle me. The indents (in characters) of the lines in stanza 1 are 0 4 0 2 2 4 6 2 4 6 0 1. In stanzas 2-11 the pattern is slightly different - 0 4 0 2 2 4 6 4 4 6 0 1. Lines 1 and 3 (same indent) sometimes rhyme (down/sown, interference/chance, ants/haunts, appear/shy, life/limb, skull/fell, degrees/tree, growth/forgot, rain/trapped, earthed/fair, stand/planned). Line 4 has 2 syllables, line 5 has 8. The rest vary, I think (e.g. the first lines have 13, 14, 13, 14, 12, 12, 12, 13, 11, 14, 14 syllables, I think). What's the point? Maybe the title refers to the persona's laziness? I don't understand the content either.
"The Gadget" and "Life During the Great Acceleration" are based on good enough ideas, but I don't think they're executed well. For example in the latter, "I was a data tanner. I lifted your skin/ while it was still blood-warm with information" seems weak to me. not least because in computer gaming "skin" has a particular meaning.
In "The Keeper of Red Carpets", "Perspective slackens like an ankle rope// in a gallery" struggles, and "The stockroom phone is ringing off the hook" puzzles me.
"Moss" has gaps between words - trendy but pointless. What does "where an Iron Age head listens to the party wall of a pond" mean? "Long-Eared Owl' has gaps too, but they replace punctuation (I think).
"Sparrowhawk" (the poem's from the bird's PoV) ends with "Hard to tear your gaze away/ from how I'm fixed on the task in claw?/ Admit it. In amongst your stringy ethics/ you lurve watching a hawk like a hawk" which sounds a bit cheap.
"Nightjar" is weak. "The Story of the Hangover" should be prose - it's all about content. "Gannet" is 3 "ababcdcd" stanzas. "Saturday" goes through the days of the week, "the midweek sump", etc. "Beach" is a page of prose, with an empty half-page between the title and the text.
My impression is that he's unsuccessfully trying some different styles. There are few of the kind of poems of his that I used to like.
Other reviews
- Kate Kellaway
- Will Burns (The language is clean, clear, the eye always unnervingly accurate. But the book is shot through with notes of uncertainty, doubt. Some sense that the world has changed while the poet’s back was turned)
- Roy Marshall (a collection that displays all of Farley’s celebrated characteristics, namely, dry humour, great technical skill, a wonderful ear for the music of language, and an ability to coin surprising and inventive images. ... While Farley’s technique never fails to impress, some readers might find that a number of the poems in this collection leave them wondering who is who and what is what. ... Farley approaches from oblique and multiple angles, sometimes taking ambiguous routes around and through his themes in order to conflate and conjoin ideas ... Readers might find the more complex poems intriguing and rewarding or alternatively, frustratingly opaque and difficult to follow. ... ‘Sloth’ explores a sense of culpability, acknowledging that the speaker of the poem has taken his eye ‘off the ball’, becoming distracted from ‘what matters’ and distanced from interaction with a disappearing environment, seduced, as much through inattention as anything else, by what is instant, facile, virtual and disposable.)
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