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Exile by Gary Allen,
72pp, ISBN 0-9537570-8-0, Black Mountain Press, Ballyclare, Co Antrim, N. Ireland, 2004.

It is tempting, on first reading, to imagine these poems rising like a genie out of the eleventh pint of Guinness consumed in an "Irish" bar in some distant capital. If Gary Allen's first collection Languages "hovers on the edge of despair" as Mebh McGuckian puts it, Exile is right down there in the pit of boozer's gloom. But my metaphor must stop there, for these poems are not maudlin or morose — they have the grace of one who is at home at least in his language, and who knows how to make its rhythms resonate to his pain:

     drive on by, the street children jeer
     to that other life you have built from want
     the past is a tourniquet ...

The exiled Ulster reader will be seduced by the ring of placenames — Skerry, Racavan, Ballymarlagh, Liminary — "lost landscapes glimpsed once more", but the lens providing the glimpse is distorted, as we exiles know, by time and by what time does. The notion of exile, so beloved by poets, is a multi-layered one, and Allen excavates and exposes the layers in such a way that nothing feels like cliché. Exiled, like everyone, from childhood and family history, exiled also by distance from familiar language and landscapes, and by the present self from all of its might-have-beens, Allen acknowledges the fruitlessness of "going back". Yet there are hints of hope, and a coming-to-terms:

     listen, like one who understands
     the sum of his history

     for it is counted out in small things —
     palm held crumbs.

Bathos, maybe, but in a good way, for Allen writes with a controlled assurance that earns the reader's trust.