"The Mizzy" by Paul Farley (Picador, 2019)

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.)

"The Dark Film" by Paul Farley (Picador, 2012)

There's always been a nostalgia component to Farley's work. W.N.Herbert, on the inside cover, writes that Farley "has the knack of both establishing and undermining the securities of memory purely through turn of phrase" but in this book I think too many poems depend almost purely on nostalgia. Admitting to it nostalgically (as he does in "A Thousand Lines") doesn't make it any better.

The collection begins with "The Power" - a list of imperatives, ending with "Now look around your tiny room/ and tell me that you haven't got the power". Maybe it's not about being a writer.

It was at the 6th poem, "Newts", that I began to wonder whether nostalgia had taken him over. "The Airbrake People" restored my faith - the narrator imagining a lost tribe of unseen people responsible for the sighs "as if the night itself received a puncture". With "Saturday Irons" we're nostalging again, the dials on 11 - "flaying flexes/ with a repeating diamond adder pattern ... rusty shields scorched into shirts-for-school", ending with "Those irons sank/ like dead-weights where they'd once steamed full ahead/ across the wrinkled fabric of the world,/ into the kitchen cupboard's dark sea bed." ("One of the most disarmingly original poets now writing", wrote Alan Brownjohn)

"The Planetarium" is ok and "Odometer" is tidy. "Pop" is very light. "Gas" is typical of many poems in the book. It starts well enough - "Seeing the country from a train/ I've grown convinced its gasholders/ in fact are used to house the spite/ and gloom of post-industrial towns". There are 15 lines of padding before we reach the final line - "Everybody wears a mask". It's short speculative fiction with enhanced imagery, as is "The Dark Film" (whose I idea I think I've heard before anyway). "Brent Crude" is more interesting, but it's followed by "The Milk Nostalgia Industries".

Here's one stanza of five that comprise "Peter O'Sullevan"

and my aunt who lived in Aintree would turn the sound down on her telly so we heard the hooves, the 'real horses', and something is gained and lost years before I'll read a word of the verse which by fits and starts will lead me to the Classical world, its stables and silks, but my wires are already crossed

It's abab, though with lines this long the impact of the form's diluted. This is one of the poem's more obviously "poetic" stanzas. Even so, the language avoids being put under any pressure.

There's more left in his nostalgia-kitty - "Nostalgie Concrète" uses the idea of time going backwards - "I never want to see ... a biro drink/ its words". Of course, the basic idea's been used several times. Is this a new twist? No.

"A Thousand Lines" nostalges about schools, ending "They should have had you stay behind/ and made you write a thousand lines./ I will not write nostalgic poems./ I will put these things out of mind" ("'The Dark Film' is a profound meditation on time", it says on the back cover).

"Brawn" contains "a waiter brings us testa in cassetta/ which, in another tongue, means 'head in a box'". Quite what we're supposed to make of a narrator who expends 2 lines to say this I don't know. I think his earlier books are better.

Other reviews

• Ben Wilkinson (Guardian)
• John Field
• Kate Kellaway (Observer)
• Nicholas Pierpan (Tower Poetry)
• Matthew Stewart
• Carl Griffin (Wales Arts Review)

"Tramp in Flames" by Paul Farley (Picador, 2006)

It's rare for a poem of his to offer nothing at all - even if the idea isn't perfectly executed there'll be some saving observation or twist. That said, I found the long poems a struggle - "Civic" is 7 pages of syllabics; "Requiem for a Friend" is 10 full pages; and "The Big Hum" goes on for 4 pages (the 7-page "I Ran All the Way Home" is just a list of short paragraphs, albeit very readable). Between, there are poems like "Tramp in Flames", "Winter Games" and "The Heron" where he makes the most of an opportunity, accumulating apt, unexpected images. "An Orrery of Hats" is a fine idea that doesn't quite come off - hats being compared to meteors, dead satellites, etc.

I hesitate to quote too much for the book because some poems depend heavily on the images, so "Warning: Spoilers Ahead": many readers will like (for example) the thought of an old Ovaltine tin turning into a kind of music box with remembered jingles, or "a polystyrene cup edging across a table on a train like contact at a séance".

"The Ice Age" by Paul Farley (Picador, 2002)

I know I shouldn't bother with the blurb but again the term "formally gifted" appears. True, there's a variety/awareness of forms, and they're unobtrusive, which to some people is a sign of skill. But they're also rather hard to discern, with non-rhymes and half-rhymes added rather randomly. Rhyming pairs like "hill/bottle", "born/London", "roses/hours", "abandoned/Austin" appear. "Dead Fish" might or might not rhyme the 1st line with the last, the 2nd with the next to last, etc - it's hard to tell, but I presume there must be some reason for the line-breaks (in particular the paragraph break). "The Glassworks" is right-aligned (well, why not? It just about suits the content) with rhymes like "heights/fit". The language doesn't feel "under pressure". Page 13 has terza rima with rhymes like "fade/thread/code" and "lost/tests/past" scattered amongst stronger rhymes. What do the stronger rhymes signify?

All the same, I like his imagery, observation and associations even if he does use too many words. E.g.

A tunnel, unexpected. The carriage lights we didn't notice weren't on prove their point and a summer's day is cancelled out, its greens and scattered blue, forgotten in a instant that lasts the width of a down, level to level, a blink in London to Brighton in Four Minutes that dampens mobiles - conversations end mid-sentence, before speakers can say '...a tunnel' - and the train fills with the sound of itself

Even "Umbrella" has its moments, though "Relic" is going too far.

"The Boy from the Chemist is Here to See You" by Paul Farley (Picador, 1998)

I like many of his ideas (I can read whole poetry books liking next to no ideas, so this is quite something). The book has 49 pages with poetry on them, which doesn't sound like much but that's about 40 pages worth of text - his lines are nearly the width of the page, varying little in length. Many poems have a rhyme pattern that's more-or-less adhered to, and there are metrical patterns too. Whether this is considered "formally assured" (as in the blurb) or formally slack probably depends on what you're familiar with. When (as in "A Minute's Silence") he doesn't use rhyme but still has 4-line stanzas one wonders what the point of the form is - the line/stanza breaks seem rather arbitrary. If you like early-Armitage(?) observation - "deckchairs offseason", "chamois frozen tight into bucket", "Che stares down onto an unmade bed", "spotlit five-a-side cage" - you'll like this book.