Published 15 January 2013 TODAY
"Patricia Farrell's latest collection engages in an
extended thought experiment to test the philosophical veracity of language.
Needless to say, language is found wanting, yet in these extraordinary
enquiries something desirable is recovered. If 'the things I see when I read
aren't real,' this investigation into subjects as diverse as scale,
orientation, colour, light, time, animals, angels and death offers a complex
and sceptical vision of a world in which 'there is only movement.' Via
encounters with the troubadour poet Guillaume of Poitiers, Friedrich Hölderlin
and the contemporary goldsmith Jivan Astfalck, Farrell offers 'new solutions /
new songs,' whilst 'provoking new lines of thought.' This challenging work
might make us feel 'hardly more than poets and not who we really are' but who
cares when 'tongue play makes sense like this'?"
—Scott Thurston
—Scott Thurston
Patricia Farrell lives in Liverpool. She is a poet and
visual artist. She co-organised the SubVoicive reading series in London in the
1980s and was a member of the arts group New River Project. She has
collaborated with other writers and artists, most notably Robert Sheppard, as
well the installation artist Jivan Astfalck, on the project B*twixst,
and with Jennifer Cobbing, and Veryan Weston on the dance piece, A Space
Completely Filled with Matter. Her work is published in a range of
magazines and collections, including A New Tonal language in the Reality
Street "4 pack"' series, as well as individual pamphlets: most
recently, Seven Bays of Spirituality (Knives Forks and Spoons Press).
She completed a PhD thesis in 2011 on poetic artifice in philosophical writing.
