The keynote poems in Gary Allen's auspicious debut collection are deceptively minor-key family narratives, electrified when you least expect it by visceral epiphanies of love, sex, and death — like human memory itself. Allen summons up the textures of language and experience with impressive fluency: these poems understand 'the wood, the grain, the precise cut ... the simple beauty of a drawer with its own whisper and light movement' ('The Cabinet Maker')
Martin Mooney
These poems are raw and brutal, unusual in their sensitivity to the particular vulnerability of women. Although they hover on the edge of despair, they also offer a valuable and much needed insight into the thwarted lives of the poor, and are as powerful in their way as the satires of Rita Ann Higgins
Medbh McGuckian
Like the craftsman in his poem 'The Cabinet Maker', Gary Allen's poems are well-made, dovetailed and bevelled. They deal with raw material — pain, loss, sexual violence, harsh personal memories honestly faced. In a technique that refines and controls through rhythm and voice, the blunt energy of experience is given shape and direction. The poems are finished but within this technical achievement is a startling world. Allen's voice is intense and clear; he confronts the unpleasant, suggests further horrors, further violence, but behind the anguish is a sensibility that accepts and perseveres.
Maurice Harmon
Languages costs £7.00 and was published in 2002.
ISBN: 978-1-873226-57-5
Gary Allen was born in Ballymena, Co Antrim, and has returned to live there after spending many years on the Continent, especially Holland, where he settled for a time. His poems and stories have appeared in a large number of literary magazines in Ireland, Britain, Holland and France, and during the 1990s he published four poetry pamphlets, but Languages is his first full collection.
 |
 |
 |
Web site design by Cornwell Internet. Page last updated on 9th December 2009.
Flambard Press Ltd is a non-commercial, not-for-profit limited company registered in England and Wales. Registered number: 05983763.
Registered office: Holy Jesus Hospital, City Road, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 2AS.