Bücher von Tim Allen

The texts in this volume run parallel with the years of Austerity leading to Brexit and its fallout, issues internalised here before resurfacing within new narrative contexts and scenarios in which modern cultural history competes with autobiographical conflict to be transported elsewhere by the chimera of language.

Peasant Tower is a book-length poem by the UK poet Tim Allen. Riding along on the top deck, its 275 couplets have a range of sound like this: // film director stands out in swarm of snappers / litter on radar skittles behind vehicle // skis clutter up left luggage / get your tongue around the yawn of an afternoon prayer // bums and faces but no overheads / stories in which young men's wallets are cuckoo clocks // incinerator in church cellar / a bird with eleven feet gets accepted by the establishment // messing around with an extraction fan / emasculated by a dowsing stick // subeditor crosses out coincidences in crossword / e.g. bus shelter in cathedral crypt // gull on its tod on refuse tip reads scorched love letter / vintage carnival route empty of the peanut // she stands back-to-front before a lost child / motorcycle sidecar carrying a demolished block of flats //

The Voice Thrower is from a batch of long poems begun in the 90s, arising in my "anti poetry" phase. The title should speak for itself, except it doesn't, which is the whole point of being a voice thrower. The poem had a twin, The Submissive Bastards, initially sharing the trope of a red sky at dusk, but TVT's sky turned into a horizon at sea, specifically from Portland looking west across Lyme Bay (Portlanders call it West Bay anyway). While The Voice Thrower's bastard twin became more controlled, TVT grew ever wilder until, while trying to round it off, I began to suspect the poem was an unconscious attempt to engage with the memory of my mother (Hannah Lawton), yet I resisted making this the focus and let the poem mutate again, the original trope of the red horizon (my mother had red hair) spreading rhizome-like through the various scenarios. The irony though was that the more it tried to resist biography the more autobiographical it became. -Tim Allen