Set in "a world before Elvis, in a Liverpool before the Beatles", Terence Davies' film "Distant Voices, Still Lives" is an elegiac and intensely autobiographical meditation on a post-war working-class childhood. Paul Farley's study of the film is both a personal response, as a Liverpudlian and as a poet, and an exploration of Davies' unique visual style, blending the spaces - the "short halls, stairways, coal cellars and meter cupboards of northern England" - and sounds - the BBC shipping forecast, a pub sing-a-long, the strains of Vaughan Williams and Britten - of memory.

Author Biography

PAUL FARLEY is a poet, broadcaster and lecturer in creative writing at Lancaster University. His first collection of poetry, The Boy from the Chemist is Here to See You (1988) won a Forward Prize and the Somerset Maugham Award, and his second, The Ice Age (2002) was awarded the Whitbread Poetry Prize in 2003. He was named the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year in 1999. A new collection of poems will be published in 2006.