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There is a poem called ‘Old Colliers’ in Graham Allen’s A Time, A Place that essentially sums up the overall mood of the book. It firmly establishes how the poet, despite his education and experiences, feels the strong pull of his roots in the industrial and mining community of South Wales:

Did I think to be rid of them, especially one
who when I called sent me straight for bread,
hiding his furred loaf and drizzling cheese:
round and round who mutters still to me,
What time is it, what day, what century?

Dust, their lungs’ rasped weather, dust on me,
What time is it, what day, what century?

The interesting thing is the use of the phrase, “Did I think to be rid of them”, which suggests that the poet might have wanted to be, at least at some point in his life. Other poems describe how he won a scholarship that took him away from home and that, in any case, he was never really a part of the manual working world of his father and other people. There are references to a boy with his head “full of Donne, Shakespeare and Keats”, and an admission that “my body was never my meal ticket”. And yet, the nagging doubt that something was lost, even betrayed, by leaving home and earning a living in a different way is always there.

     Of course, the old days and old ways have gone and the poems acknowledge that fact by describing “the old works’ smoky dereliction” and the “persistence in the way he coughs” as an old man comes to the end of his life. The onetime industrial landscapes are grassed over so that later generations will forget what was once there, but the poet, remembering how things were, asks: “Have they found some way of growing/ grass over that kind of thing?”.

     This is quite a powerful book, not because of any startling imagery or technical innovations, but because it deals directly and truthfully with themes that have a much wider application than the specific locations referred to. The question of roots, the decline of communities, the relationship between father and son, and whether or not one can stay loyal while moving on, are matters that never go away. Graham Allen has made a brave attempt to get to grips with them.