The Mizzy

Description

Paul Farley is now widely recognized as one of the leading English poets writing today. As usual it is impossible to summarize 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. The Mizzy encapsulates one of poetry's most capacious and eclectic imaginations.

Paul Farley was born in Liverpool in 1965 and studied at the Chelsea School of Art. He has published four collections of poetry with Picador, most recently The Dark Film (2012). His other books include Edgelands (with Michael Symmons Roberts, 2011), and he has also edited a selection of John Clare's poetry. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a frequent broadcaster, he has received numerous awards including Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year, the Whitbread Poetry Prize and the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters.