“Graham Allen’s astonishing new collection unflinchingly stares down
the horror and fragility of life: dejection, illness, age, the grim
inevitability with which youth becomes no more than ‘a pile of neglected
photos’. But it’s also a book that looks beyond the brute ‘bitterness
and bone’ of human existence to the smell and sight of roses, to each
snowflake’s drifting mandala, to ‘every sensory second’ of a beauty that
comes not too late but exactly on its hour.
Here is the stuff
of no ordinary bildungsroman, taking us from schoolyard betrayal to
sexual awakening against the backdrop of the Salvation Army’s
interminable sermons, to painful life lessons acquired amid a night
club’s ‘spitting crescendo’. Through it all there flickers the promise
of art and music, an unimaginable, unlocatable world somewhere beyond
the drab pock-marked milieu of organised religion, one which liberty,
possibility and creative self-definition.
This is a collection
that resonates with an irresistible punk-ish howl, a cry not only of
rage and defiance but also of profound, almost sacred affirmation.”
Billy Ramsell
“Graham Allen’s latest collection Without Covenant draws
together pressing themes, and of course, intertexts, challenging our
attempted ignorance of their undercurrents running beneath the stories
we tell ourselves and language itself. His poems on Parkinson’s conjure
and tangle with experiences that will be familiar to those who have it
and those who support us. In other poems, the unique perspective of our
disease inflects the poet’s vision: ‘The wind picks up, the bees
depart,/the mountains darken as clouds hide the sun./You remain in your
seat as rain arrives,/struck by how things continue to end.’”
Kimberly Campanello
“Allen
is a steely witness. These poems filled with body, life and unearthly
kingdoms face us into the high winds of what it means to be human and
hurtling through time and space. Without Covenant harnesses the very best of what poetry can do.”
Annemarie Ní Churreáin
Graham Allen was born and raised in the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham, and was educated in Barking Abbey Comprehensive School. He was brought up in the Salvation Army until, in 1982, he left home to study for his degree at St David’s College, Lampeter, National University of Wales. He received his BA in English literature in 1985, when he moved to Sheffield University, where he gained a Masters degree in Philosophy, Literary Criticism and Linguistics in 1986 and his PhD in 1993. He was appointed to his first full academic post at Dundee University in 1990 and he came to work in University College Cork in 1995 where he is now Professor in English.
He is the author of numerous academic books including Harold Bloom: A Poetics of Conflict (Harvester, 1994), Intertextuality (Routledge, 2000. 3rd Ed. 2022), and Representing the New AI Film and Television
(Bloomsbury, 2024). He has published extensively on literary and
cultural theory and on Romantic literature; his work has been translated
into Japanese, Korean, French, Portuguese, and Persian.
His poetry collections include The One That Got Away (New Binary Press 2014), The Madhouse System (New Binary Press 2016) and Without Covenant (Salmon
2024). He was the winner of the Listowel Single Poem Prize in 2010 and
has been shortlisted for a number of other awards including the Crashaw
Prize, the Strong/Shine Prize, and the Listowel First Collection Prize.
His poetry has been published in a host of journals, including Banshee,
The Stinging Fly, The Rialto, Five Points, Southword, The Stony
Thursday Book, Poetry Ireland Review, The Examiner, The Irish Times, and many more. Harold Bloom, the brilliant but notorious author of The Western Canon and The Anxiety of Influence,
said of Allen’s first collection: ‘This new work is a throwback to the
High Romantics. It is haunted by Blake, Shelley, and Keats, and is a
worthy continuation of their magnificent tradition…. Should [he]continue
to leap ahead of himself like this, he may yet achieve permanence as a
poet.’
Graham Allen is also a digital poet. His epoem “Holes”
was begun on 23rd December, 2006. It is now in its 18th year with one
ten syllabled line per day being updated each week by New Binary Press.
In 2024, “Holes” was selected to be part of the six-month exhibition of
writing not on the page in The Museum of Literature, Ireland (MOLI),
entitled Is This a Poem?
Useful links:
http://www.holesbygrahamallen.org
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_Allen_(writer)
