The Boy from the Chemist is Here to See You Book

Paul Farley has already won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection with this book; he is a rare debutante in that rather than showing promise, he delivers much already. Born in Liverpool in 1965, Farley has a premature nostalgia and seems to have been born an elegist; in a book full of appreciative references to the cinema, he acknowledges: "It's clear I love the footage of the past". But Farley, though tender, is no sentimentalist; witty and precise, he weaves between an affectionate rendering of some of the grittier and unfashionable sides of his city's inhabitants ("the seventies live on in top- floor flats") and a mistrustful, ambivalent embrace of modernity. In "Monopoly", the harmless economic battles of the board game give way to real lives of buildings and work, but it is Farley who loyally remains: "sole freeholder of every empty office space in town, and from the quayside I can count the cost each low tide brings--the skeletons and rust of boats, cars, hats, boots, iron, a terrier". Farley writes with an engaging directness without sacrificing metre and form, his handling of which is, properly, unobtrusively effective. For a young poet to write with wit and intelligence in such an unshowy way, and to avoid the casual cynical use of irony so popular at the moment, is a triumph; here is a writer utterly at home in contemporary culture who treats his milieu with benign, mature scepticism. --Robert PottsRead More