Graham Allen’s Poetry Collection Praised for Emphasising the Value of Reading

29 Jun 2015

Review of Graham Allen’s The One That Got Away in Tailwinds

Graham Allen’s The One That Got Away was published by New Binary Press in 2014. Tailwinds is a “young, New York City-based press ... edited by dedicated individuals with significant experience in writing, print media, and academia ... [believing] in intelligent work that is compelling, accessible, and relevant to the spirit of our time.”

The review highlights the collection's emphasis on the value of reading:

"Mr. Allen thus bucks a general trend whereby there is a severe shortage of readers and an equally troubling surplus of writers. Any half-literate person clutching a copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude can (and does) declaim about the process of writing. It takes significantly more mental overhead to write, as Mr. Allen does, about the process of reading. Aside from Umberto Eco (who, being a professor of semiotics, clearly has some vested intellectual interest in experiments like The Mysterious Flame of Queen Lloana), it’s not clear if the novelistic form can absorb such an enterprise. But, as Mr. Allen shows, the window of opportunity is wide open for poetry."

"A fitting tribute to so many things: to the mythical and sublime lurking alongside the ridiculous, to the (mostly) unsentimental love of Albion, to long walks in the footsteps of your life’s most cherished heroes. Perhaps, however, it’s also a song to how and whom we read, which is in some sense who we truly are."

The full review can be accessed here

The radio broadcast Lighthouse by Fabian Sweeney includes an interview with Graham Allen reflecting on his epoem holesbygrahamallen.org