Much has been written about Michael Farrell’s poetry over the last two decades or so. His work has been lauded for its irony, parody, wordplay, its literary and pop-cultural referentiality, as well as for its burlesque and kitsch intertextuality, irreverence, and pastiche. Farrell is undoubtedly one of Bombala’s wittiest and most intimidatingly funny poets. It is not, however, the goal of this review (though it may be one of the outcomes) to re-describe Farrell’s penchant for irony. Rather, this review aims to notice within Googlecholia the sincerity, materiality, and vulnerability within Farrell’s most recent poetic mode. Farrell’s poems, while treating themes of alienation, simulation, virtual vortex, and melancholia, are rich in both materiality and referent. They challenge us as readers not only because they are complex, and because Farrell is such a fan of poetry (such a fan in general) that he is able to draw upon and invent formal modes of so many different kinds. They also challenge us because by being so inkily, cheekily, and wordily themselves they expose to ourselves all of the layers of apothecaried bullshit we have learned to mediate our realities and dampen our senses with so that we may unite with a virtual wasteland of purifying simulation often referred to as ‘the net.’

Underscoring the disenchanted-but-bemused, sad-but-intrigued tone of Farrell’s poems in this volume is his commitment, as ever, to novelty and formal playfulness. Farrell pointed out in his recent Cordite interview with Harry Reid, that “Jane Austen makes it clear that sincerity exists in relation to irony as much as insincerity” and asks how “anyone [can] be sincere if they are saying the same thing as everyone else, and in the same way?” (5; 5). If Farrell’s work is so often ironic it is because he is acutely aware of how things are expected to be said and of how unfelt it is to write poems that fulfill these expectations. In this aspect, parody, irony, pastiche, etc., are vehicles for escaping fakery. They are necessary measures by which, as a poet, Farrell can make poetic bouquets that come at us unclothed, without the armour of repetitive parroting or cultural reinforcement/re-enactment. Farrell’s poem ‘Big Blue Play,’ for example, resembles a theatrical script with detailed, yet incomplete dramatis personae, setting notes, and stage directions (45-48). The script couches a polyvocal experiment (‘experiment’ being a clinical word for ‘play’) in the form of a four-voiced character called the “Big Blue Woman” (45). The character’s enmeshed and, at times, simul-speaking poly-vocality comes into strange contact with the voices of other vaguely referred-to actors on the set of an office-floor:

      They walk into an office. ‘This is.’ ‘This is my.’
      ‘This is my-my-my.’
      ‘Desk.’ they say. ‘Office.’ ‘We.’ ‘I am the new [mumble],’ they say.
Out the windows of the random corporate tower they see the blue
sky. ‘That is me.’ ‘Us.’
      ‘That is us,’ they say.
      ‘That is me,’ they say.
      ‘You must be the new [mumble]’ says an actor, approaching
her/them.
      ‘Yes!’
      ‘I hope you’re good at [mumble]ing.’

(‘Big Blue Play,’ 46)

The Big Blue Woman who, “has come down from the mountains, where she is a feared / mythological FIGURE, to join contemporary urban LIFE,” encounters office-working vocal singularities whose casual use of the word ‘I’ leaves her/them with a deep sense of unease and panic (45). This is conveyed by frequent laughter (“Haha” or “Hahaha” (46-48)) and compulsive statements of positive affirmation. The poem gushes interwoven layers of italicised and bold font, bordering on typological slapstick. The relatability of toxic corporate positivity and the weirdness of the scene with its clunky and awkward interactions conjures tears of sad mirth.

Farrell is dedicated to the material being of his poems, the arrangements of words and phrases on a page; poems as bouquets of language. Other poets often arrange ideas and feelings seemingly atop the material tableau of language; poems as perfume bottled in an apothecary. Farrell’s poems are the flowers, not simply their imitation. Or, as Farrell writes in ‘Stick Bears Fruit,’ writing a poem is “like being a god rather than / Pretending you are a god” (37). Without smacking us over the head, Farrell draws our attention to the wordy physical being of these poems that have been printed on real booky pages;

                                                                  […] A book can be an object-
child to a musician. To writers, books are more like bales of hay.
You might sit on one, you might let a guest sit on one, but you do
mean to eat it eventually. Think of surgeons in the Middle Ages,
reading books between operations, leaving blood on the pages.
Operating with traces of ink on their hands, actual metaphors
under their fingernails. […]

(‘Unread … Unwritten,’40)

Farrell reminds us of the faith that writing has in the material, as much as in the abstract existence of metaphors, puns, narratives, and even grammar. To get to us, these poems must be transported as ¬matter, formed and patterned, fragile, and vulnerable to blotting and smearing – the glitches of the non-digital world.

Farrell remains interested, in a sort of disinterested way, in the tension between poetry and prose:

                                      […] What, I’ve been asked, is the
tension between a sentence and a stanza? (Or you might
say: between a block of flats and a plaza.) […]

(‘Advantages Of Stopovers,’ 1)

Reading some of the more narrative, sentence-y poems in this book, notably, ‘On Meeting A Retired Orange,’ I began to wonder what it would be like to read a Farrellian novel. Would I know, from the feeling of it, that I wasn’t reading his poetry? Would it strike me more as potpourri than live floristry?

                           […] If the article needed colour, it was there for the
transfer in ‘call me Dirk’’s apartment. But it was also distracting,
looking at the gold soccer balls, the purple inflatables, and the
movie posters. Dirk made us drinks while I was reminded of several
dreams I’d had that week, of a book on Freud, a basement flat with
a view of a record shop, a Danish that a man brought into a café in
Berlin, that was a cushion for its own topping. […]

(‘On Meeting A Retired Orange,’ 32)

Farrell’s ‘prose poems’ resemble blocks of flats with plazas on their interior and terrazas outside, with archways and tunnels of metaphor connecting the gardens of each. Farrell celebrates poetry for what it is, for what it has and does, not what it doesn’t do, or have, or isn’t. A poem can be an interview, a poem can be a portrait, a poem can be a joke, a stack of dreams, a cake to be eaten etc., so quit the rhetorical questions and lean into it.