In a generous tribute to a Romantic forerunner, the contemporary poet Paul Farley has hailed John Clare as an outstanding evoker of place. Farley is appreciative of how, in a poem such as ‘The Lament of Swordy Well’, Clare personifies the place, giving it a voice of its own. In Farley's reading, though, this does not amount to a simple manifestation of delimited locality. Clare, he claims, ‘speaks out of, and for, the fragility of the natural world and the rootedness of places […] bearing witness or giving voice to a landscape being altered irrevocably’. Farley contrasts this to the sense of place conveyed by Wordsworth: where the Lake Poet ‘could posit a continuum, an immortality’, Clare presents ‘a great web of interconnectedness [that] has been snicked at and jeopardized’. Readers familiar with Farley's work will notice that he is, in part, speaking on the basis of his own experience here: he, too, writes out of a very temporal experience of place, whereby a complex ‘web of interconnectedness’ has been ineluctably changed. Like Clare, Farley too feels the tug of the past. Yet in other respects his experience appears to be different. The specific locality that Farley most frequently returns to tends to be urban rather than rural, as he focuses on the Liverpool in which he grew up. There is also less straightforward idealisation in Farley's work: pastoral celebrations of childhood havens and immediacies tend to be accompanied by complicating factors. As I will show in this essay, the Liverpool in which Farley grew up was far from idyllic. In addition, the speaker of his city poems often comes across as just as much a perpetrator as a victim, and the partially empowering activities of remembering and representing are acknowledged alongside loss and lack.

The result is a rich poetry of place which cannot be framed from within the confines of any single theoretical vantage point. One of Farley's essays is titled ‘Space is the Place’, and certainly any approach that unduly privileges space or place is ill equipped to capture the complexity of how his poetry addresses the city of Liverpool.