You can never predict how – or where – a Paul Farley poem is going to land. This hugely enjoyable collection The Mizzy (nickname for a mistle thrush) is, among other things, a birder’s book. The birds are scattered as in life – they alight between poems on other subjects. They have something of John Clare’s style or disarming lack of it (Farley was editor of a selection of Clare’s poems for Faber in 2007). Like Clare, Farley is comradely towards nature, his bird’s-eye view is respectful, his anthropomorphism not belittling.
But he has his own wit and singular insights. What the robin shows him as it hops ahead, he passes on, a plain expression of a good thought: “... showing us where the edge/ of the present moment is”.
People, although spotted less often, are seen with the same searching eye in all their irregularity. There are moving poems about a man one guesses to be Farley’s father, though he never lets on who the subject is: a man who lived to bet on the horses. In Glorious Goodwood, racing is a fleet, all-consuming, barely containable metaphor:... “his horse is still running and the horseflies/ still out for blood and in my blood…”
In The Green Man, a devastating elegy about a man kicked to death in a pub car park, Farley’s memorialising is as careful as the setting of a fire. It is a portrait not of who the man was, but what he knew (maybe the same thing). He taught “how damp and sappy wood/ burned slowly with a yellowy-green flame”, “how to bluff at stud poker” and would tell “ghost stories in a broken whisper”.
This collection is a stirring miscellany: the opening poem, Starling, describes the bird’s tendency to “witter on about my hole in the wall”. Farley may have missed a trick by not publishing Hole in the Wall – his fantastical poem about an ATM – alongside it. Then there is Gentian Violet, an arresting poem inspired by Shakespeare’s Sonnet 99 and DH Lawrence’s Bavarian Gentians.
The Story of the Hangover is the most sober poem about alcohol ever stumbled upon, while there is a fabulously bizarre The Keeper of Red Carpets, about a carpet depot and the fellow who cleans carpets once the celebrities have finished promenading. Its last line is so right one ought to have – yet did not – see it coming: “Somebody’s always looking to make an entrance.”
Mistle Thrush is about language and where we would be without the tent pegs of vocabulary: “The word picnic/ is a tablecloth thrown on to the grass.”
In a reclusive, parallel universe, the Mizzy outperforms people in song. Farley meanwhile pulls the picnic rug out from under the poem, adding brand names with double identities before the coup that completes the picture: “The word idyll waits out of earshot./ A faun in the fountain burbles./ There is Sunblest. There is Golden Wonder./ And then, thunder.”
Farley also has a field day writing about technology’s momentum. In The Gadget, he describes his mobile as if engaged in a restless form of birdwatching. It has an “avian shrill” and can “thrum in your hand like a frightened bird”. And in Life During the Great Acceleration – a small, jostling triumph of a poem – he imagines furriers, farriers, coopers in charge of insubstantial data. It ends with unsettling, unharmonious half-rhyme: “I was a data tanner. I lifted your skin/ while it was still blood-warm with information.”
Farley does not let his poetic mastery mask the possibility that technology is mastering him – and us.
• The Mizzy by Paul Farley is published by Picador (£14.99). To order a copy for £13.19 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 020-3176 3837. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
Robin
It’s not so much that robins follow us
more like they lead the way, going on ahead
like useless guides with not one word of our language
but fluent in flow and lode, flitting along
whichever way we walk, breaking into song
before we catch up, and they’re off again, a few yards
further into the future. We love them for this,
for spelling it out, for showing us where the edge
of the present moment is.
A breeze has shook
the holly or whitethorn and the robin has gone,
leaving me on the sky-puddled tarmac
straddling the powerlines, along the Black Path
that forked under a streetlamp, beside the White Bridge
where the open fields began and the smell of earth
was strong.
I’ve stood in all of these places
and a part of me stands there still, till a robin surfaces
and I follow it out, as I did then. Robin, lead on.
