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