Abigail O'Hanlon reviews
The Dark Film
by Paul Farley
‘I will not write nostalgic poems’, Farley insists in ‘A
Thousand Lines’ from his newest collection, The
Dark Film. ‘I will put these things out of mind.’ Yet nostalgia is
presented as a recurring theme in this surprising and thought-provoking work.
It is especially prominent in poems like ‘Nostalgie Concrete’, or ‘The Milk
Nostalgia Industries’, where the industry of the title is ‘trading in covert
nostalgia […] it’s more than milk delivery’ – milk being used as a symbol of
reminiscence. After all, what more could you ask for from something that you
can associate with ‘Jane Austen sitting on a milking stool/with a natty teat
technique; that and a pail/each jet rings into, soft lit, in an English
field.’?
Farley also uses nostalgia in other poems – ‘like returning
to a natal pool/after years of doing business in great waters’ (‘Big Fish’), juxtaposition
of old and new feature frequently in the collection. Titles such as ‘Adults’
and ‘The New Babies’ are set next to each other, or the opposition surfaces within
the poems themselves: ‘we envied those who’d fuss/over the Ancient World […]
while we slaved on the Western Front’ (‘Ink’). He also considers history and the
passing of time, notably in ‘Creep’ (‘we feel the shock/of time in time) or
‘Pop’, a lament on the tendency of history to homogenise:
and the Mod and the Rocker
will slowly converge
will slowly converge
in the fullness of time
to a mixture, an aggregate
post-war character
post-war character
Beneath these overt themes, however, there is a more basic
idea which Farley explores: differing perspective and perception, especially from
within. Indeed, many of the poems in this collection feel not so much epic as personal
– though not necessarily intimate. This is reflected in his style, which is
accessible, bordering on conversational at times, and not without licks of
humour – take the last lines of ‘Force Field’ or ‘The Queen for example:
‘Imagine waking up […] and realising, Jesus,
I’m the fucking Queen!’.
There is occasionally a danger of his tone becoming too plain
– ‘Google Earth’, for example, has some remarkable imagery (‘eyeballs might
block the sun’) but is marred by dull repetition in its opening stanza.
However, Farley’s strength as a poet, in this collection at least, lies in his
ability to present his ideas and imagery in smart ways – perhaps appropriate
given that this is an exploration of perception – whether in passing lines ‘a
note so low it turned your bones/to milk’ (‘The Airbrake people’) or within a
poem as a whole, as in the heart motif in ‘Outside Cow Ark’, a comment on
nature’s transience.
The opening poem of the collection, ‘The Power’, acts as an
introduction to the rest of the collection’s narrative – in that it is here,
more than any other poem, that Farley challenges the reader to engage with the
power of imaginative thought (‘picture a seaside town in your head…’), a
concept which he then develops into exploring the ability to see our own world
differently.
The concept is further highlighted in ‘Quality Street’, which
takes an apparently banal activity – peering through sweet wrappers – and
transforms it into a way of reshaping reality: ‘you took us out of time and
gave us the power/to hype the moment…’ the poem is a striking example of his
ability to take the everyday and make it extraordinary:
Adding a yellow wrapper to
the sheet of blue
creates a green which covers everything,
a thousand years of growth at once
the sheet of blue
creates a green which covers everything,
a thousand years of growth at once
‘The Dark Film’, as the collection’s central poem, presents
the main theme of perception – and argues that things hidden can be brought to
light ‘if looked at long enough’. This poem is about image, and Farley uses
imagery well; the vision of ‘An eyelash […] four foot long, electrified’ is likely
to stay with the reader after the poem is finished.
Farley is able to switch between the languid half-rhymes in
the opening (‘The dark film goes on general release./Floodlights rake the low
cloud base’) to the harsher, stuttering consonance as the audience’s confusion
develops –
We wonder where the film was shot:
the Night Mail stopped, or Empire State
caught midway through a power cut
the Night Mail stopped, or Empire State
caught midway through a power cut
So he knows how to use sound to reflect mood – but he also
knows how to use language to evoke the senses. The final two stanzas of the
poem describe the film coming to an end: to say it ‘crackles like a bonfire’
may seem obvious at first, but when taken in context, it gives a strong sense
of old-style film reel flapping its last, complete with the haunting afterimage
of faces.
The poems in this collection may not profoundly move or
resonate with the reader on an emotional level, excepting the sentimentalism of
reminiscence, but this isn’t Farley’s aim here: the collection as a whole is
reaching out to the reader not emotionally, but intellectually. The Dark Film explores its subject
matter in an imaginative way – perhaps not fully (after all, there’s only so
much you can fit into one coherent collection), but what it does instead is
provide the reader with enough intrigue to challenge their own way of looking
at the world.
Abigail O'Hanlon is a third year BA student in English and Creative Writing at Kingston University; and a poet.
Comments