Shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry
An Observer Book of the Year

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.

'Farley's strength, throughout his career, is the delicacy of his poems' music, their soft lighting and good humour, and this book is no exception' - Poetry Book Society Bulletin

'A gift for making the mundane seem magical' - Observer

Paul Farley was born in Liverpool and studied at the Chelsea School of Art. He has published six collections of poetry with Picador, including The Boy from the Chemist is Here to See You, which won the Forward Poetry Prize for Best First Collection, The Ice Age, which won the Whitbread Poetry Award, and The Mizzy, which was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Costa Book Awards. His other awards include an RSL Jerwood Award for Non-Fiction, the Somerset Maugham Award, and the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has written and presented many drama and documentary features for BBC Radio and is a freelance writer and broadcaster.