When It Rained For a Million Years

by Paul Farley

A family cohabits with a horse; three riots are tucked up safely in their beds; a tumbleweed takes up a career in comedy; the giant flag crossing a football crowd has a strange effect on those underneath; a rampaging fifty-foot poem brings terror to a city… As always in Paul Farley’s work, the quotidian and the cosmic are braided together in surprising, funny, or disconcerting ways. And as always, his poems inhabit and explore intermediate, uncertain spaces, a fertile terrain found between the obscurity of the cave and the light of knowledge linked to power.

A Farley poem may be filled with recognisable objects and events, but is always alert to wider resonances. This gathering represents a new stage of development in the poet’s work, while exemplifying his unwavering faith in the music and shape of language, in the power of metaphorical transformation and a renewal of elegy, monologue, and the pastoral, in the various ways they navigate and intersect with our anxious, brittle age.

Genres: Audiobook

82 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 10, 2025

About the author

Paul Farley is the author of four collections of poetry and has received the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Whitbread Poetry Award and the E.M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Reviews

[Goodreeds User · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yeah it's fantastic

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked the author's mini introductions before each poem. The flow while recording it and his accent made this perfect to listen to while calming down and relaxing.
I would recommend this audiobook to people who don't claim to be poetry fans but secretly are (like me)