Press release for the new collection of poems by Mike Farren: Forcing Rhubarb in Bermuda? Lamentations for the West Riding (Carcanet Press, 2025).
The JugginsVerse studio is happy to promote the work of those whose artistic efforts, values and style chime with our own. Sometimes the little chaps need a little help with their stumbling efforts from the big boys! So, in that spirit, we are pleased to give a little extra publicity to the Carcanet Press’ press release for the new collection of poems by Mike Farren.
Press release for the new collection of poems by Mike Farren: Forcing Rhubarb in Bermuda? Lamentations for the West Riding (Carcanet Press, 2025).
(Embargo 01/09/2025, TLS excepted. Full press release 29/08/2025. Mike Farren bio https://www.mikefarren.co.uk
John Fuller bio https://www.johnfuller-poet.com/biog.htm)
This new collection, from Shipley’s ‘King of Poetry’ Mike Farren, is very much a book of two halves. In the first, a familiar, characteristically oppressive, atmosphere of melancholy pervades what are quintessentially poems of observation. Farren, we infer, shuffles ceaselessly and apparently aimlessly about the humble streets of his beloved but undistinguished hometown (3 miles north of sometimes riot-torn central Bradford) and writes about what he finds.
No promisingly poured pint of refreshing beer long remains unspilled on his trousers. No fragrant curry is not later frustratingly discovered to be inedibly hot and ruinous of tomorrow’s digestion. What may have seemed elegantly mill-stone flagged Yorkshire pavements are always sticky with spittle – and sometimes worse – dragging at the poorly attached (it transpires) soles of his shoes. Even an innocent, apparently casual, conversation about the cricket will probably lead to a ‘glassing’.
It is a paean to a passing culture in the West Riding of Yorkshire, expressed as much in tones of loss and mourning as with, also, some modest relief that a night out ‘in town’ may be a little less likely to end in emergency admission to the Bradford Royal Infirmary.
The second half introduces two unexpected and somewhat challenging innovations into Farren’s previously well-established stylistic armoury. The meter becomes more robustly rigid, with a new strict emphasis on the apparent necessities of rhyme, and the choice of topic and subject suggests an increasing atmosphere of the almost bawdy, and almost, also (were that really possible given the emotional heft of his previous work) an echo, perhaps, of half-remembered pier-end doggerel. The initial effect is possibly as bracing, even, as one of Farren’s own curry suppers.
I cannot think of a single previous poem in his oeuvre where so much weight, of theme, cadence and, now, rhyme, was placed on the pregnant – initially surprising but retrospectively perfectly intuitive – phrase: ‘lovely pair of knockers’. That, we can discern, if only after the fact, is where the poem, indeed the collection, and perhaps even Farren’s work as a whole, was always heading.
John Fuller, Oxford, for TLS