Poetry review – AGAINST THE STREAM: Andrew Keanie considers a comprehensive selection of Gary Allen’s poetry and sets it in the context of Northern Ireland’s troubled history
Against the Stream: Selected Poems 2003-2021
Gary Allen (edited and introduced by Paul McDonald)
Greenwich Exchange
ISBN: 9781910996874
286pp £17.99
Here, in the part of the European archipelago involving Great Britain and Ireland known to some as Ulster, to others as Northern Ireland, and to others as the north of Ireland, the agitation of identities, the feeling of claustrophobia and the legacy of the lowered horizon have shaped sectarian attitudes to writers and writings. Here is a province that has for a long time been dourly consumed by its own internal condition. ‘No place in the world’, as Seamus Heaney said, ‘prides itself more on its vigilance and realism, no place considers itself more qualified to censure any flourish of rhetoric or extravagance of aspiration’.
In Northern Ireland in the 1970s and 1980s, when the shooting and bombing was talking the talk and the goose-stepping was walking the walk, good poets needed to get the hell out. There was not much point in trying to craft language and line when the real movers and shakers were hard at it. There was not much point in keeping your head when those around you might blow it off and blame it on you. Derek Mahon’s ‘Afterlives’ (1975) remains a caustic avowal of the necessity of exile for any Northern Irish poet.
Perhaps if I’d stayed behind
And lived it bomb by bomb
I might have grown up at last
And learnt what is meant by home.
If you were, like Mahon, buzzing with Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Nerval and Rilke, you would only have found yourself wasting good thinking and writing time, coping mechanistically among the security alerts, competing narratives and pointless atrocities. You would only have been consenting to the general flattening of thought and speech into the stony rubbish of the sectarian wasteland, the country of the bombed in which the one-idea man is king.
Despite its fractured identity and fucked-up activities, N/northern Ireland collectively retained its utilitarian aspiration. It seemed to implore, with the best will in the world: what use is there in a writer whose best energies do not fly out into the fray with humanitarian tenacity? Or, as Heaney had it put to him, on a train, by a bomber-writer bumptiously sure of himself as promoter of the worthier half of the crisis, ‘When, for fuck’s sake, are you going to write / Something for us?’
Nuance was effectively cancelled. Modesty was a myth exploded. Revulsion at the Widgery whitewashing of Bloody Sunday (the atrocity involving paratroopers dispatched, by public school boys, to Derry to kill innocent people in 1972), tempted Thomas Kinsella to reduce the situation to something only Catholics (and maybe one or two repentant Protestants) could agree was actually the case. Kinsella got rid of the temptation by yielding to it. His caricature of Protestants remains strikingly written, fierily insistent, and deficient in deep subjectivity. In publishing ‘Butcher’s Dozen’ (1974), he may have disqualified himself from the mainstream UK literary scene for the rest of his life, but the canard about Protestants would prove as lasting as many antisemitic lies (Jews are animals, fat bankers, corruptors, vampires, warmongers or devil worshippers). Kinsella’s force allows no counter argument. The confirmation bias is so unflinchingly exact:
Take a bunch of stunted shoots,
A tangle of transplanted roots,
Ropes and rifles, feathered nests,
Some dried colonial interests,
A hard unnatural union grown
In a bed of blood and bone,
Tongue of serpent, gut of hog
Spiced with spleen of underdog.
Stir in, with oaths of loyalty,
Sectarian supremacy,
And heat, to make a proper botch,
In a bouillon of bitter Scotch…
Sashed and bowler-hatted, glum
Apprentices of fife and drum,
High and dry, abandoned guards
Of dismal streets and empty yards,
Drilled at the codeword ‘True Religion’
To strut and mutter like a pigeon
‘Not An Inch - Up The Queen’;
Who use their walls like a latrine…
If Kinsella’s planted, flag-waving, squamous Protestant did not quite acquire authentication in the British-Irish economy of political emphasis, there was an oft-repeated nod to the wise that Protestants were on the wrong, and Catholics on the right, side of history.
So it was something of a relief when, in 2004, Alan Gillis delivered such a darkly satirical vision of all the ‘progress’ allegedly made by light-hearted and high-minded terrorists-turned-politicians.
They say that for years Belfast was backwards
and it’s great now to see some progress.
So I guess we can look forward to taking boxes
from the earth. I guess that ambulances
will leave the dying back amidst the rubble
to be explosively healed. Given time,
one hundred thousand particles of glass
will create impossible patterns in the air
before coalescing into the clarity
of a window. Through which, a reassembled head
will look out and admire the shy young man
taking his bomb from the building and driving home.
(‘Progress’, Somebody, Somewhere 2004)
Gillis, who surely learned the strange aesthetics of narrative in reverse from Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow or Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, extended the province of ways in which it was permissible for Troubles-focused poetry to be written.
Enter Gary Allen, whose poetry is so idiosyncratic and ambitious, and so uninterested in contributing, or even paying lip service, to the longstanding literary whinge of Irish nationalism.
Why do you throw stones and petrol bombs? he asked,
For fun, we shrugged, grinning sheepishly as though caught
on a border
between what has always been for us, and what is new.
(‘Jesus Clocks In’, p.218)
It is not clear in the above lines who is throwing the stones and petrol bombs, and it is not clear what ‘border’ they are ‘caught / on’. The reader is free to infer. But try pinning ‘what has always been for us’ or ‘what is new’ down to one meaning. The poem seems to allow room between the lines for the reader to insert his or her own predilections and prejudices. Despite ‘we’ and ‘us’, this is Troubles-focused poetry speaking with refreshing respect for the individual mind.
Allen looks at life not with an agenda but from a coherent individuality.
Sometimes, in a moment, the mind gets a rush
like a train entering and leaving a short tunnel
like the first time I saw a bomb going off
the excruciating silence, then the strange barking of dogs
before the pavement began to tremble under your feet
and the buildings shuddered, followed by a deafening bang
the crazy sound of sirens, walls imploding, screams
dust billowing out like sea clouds
the million flapping shredded office blinds –
and I didn’t realise until much later
that I was bleeding, streaming down my face
it all seemed so impersonal
that I never thought of blaming anyone…
(‘The Wide Blue Yonder’, p.206).
He is not saying he has the whole truth. He is showing that he is entangled in the truth. He does not have every answer, but he is effectively endorsing a profusion of partially determined issues, the nature of which invites contemplation rather than calls for ‘closure’.
In May 2022, Prime Minister Boris Johnston’s announcement of plans to ‘draw a line under the Troubles’ by ending all prosecutions relating to the Troubles before 1998 was a nifty little move, as if with our best interests at heart – a Swiftian little policy, a modest proposal to bamboozle us with down-to-earth banality, while the amazing constellation of unsolved crimes glitters good-humouredly and out of reach over our pretty troubled little heads.
Allen’s poetry is a very civilized response to the recent rumpus of delusion, credulity and ‘conflict-resolution’. It is a wisely-layered articulation of an adrenalized clarity unwelcome in the recently-agreed N/northern Ireland: people formerly known for causing explosions in our public places are now our peace pundits, and we are to accept the words they speak now rather than question the things they have done in the past. Have the bombs become less bombly recollected in tranquillity? Is the lasting devastation less devastating wrapped in our new peaceniks’ platitudes? Maybe all the people still living lives ripped to pieces should put their misfortunes down to mysterious causes and move on:
caught in that fear of the unseen, the unknown
like whether my father would come back from working
on the border
or my mother die in flames at the back of a firebombed shop
or playing games coming home from school
as to which car would be the one to explode.
(‘The Monster’, p.260)
Allen’s poetry enacts the emotional intelligence of the ordinary individual brought up in Northern Ireland during the troubles: vigilant and realistic, yet as free in imagination as anyone anywhere else. For example, in ‘The Graves’ (from the collection Jackson’s Corner) we find Allen’s recollected childhood experience of witnessing a bomb explode; it feels so deeply personal and yet is also such a finely perceptive recollection of a child’s pure (not yet politicised) point of view:
the first time I saw a bomb exploding
I thought it was the most beautiful thing in the world
all that glass, timber, and masonry
deconstructing itself just for me
like everything is for me.
This is writing that belongs to the compressed condition of your last minute. Allen is so in command of his subject it seems as if he is the subject. His is an almost instantly recognisable northern Irish voice, full of hard disturbing realism and something dreamlike too. It can sound for a line or two like the vexing whine of a Ballymena street preacher, but it can just as readily deepen, in the next couple of lines, into something more mind-expanding.
You who think you know God
Think again
lie close to the wall of your thinking
listen to the rattle in his anger.
(‘The Next Room’, p.119)
Allen’s voice is that of an unaffiliated citizen with nothing much to say about either the big political fantasy of Irish republicanism or the major media outlets that oxygenised its violent life before collapsing with it into a sort of arts centre exhibition.
Martin McGuinness is dead
And the IRA volunteers
Will be polishing their Sam Browne belts
Washing their cotton masks
Smoothing their khaki pants
little make-believe soldiers
while the politicians and priests
will be thinking of something good to say
to the television cameras and the sombre BBC.
Stormont will be wrapped in a big black bow…
Allen finds in his own incredulity hidden confirmation of an odd angle from which life can be looked at. He has no need to intensify resentment. The vision, as it is, fumes with visual intensity. Yes, the reader is briefly reminded of a whole world of unfashionable suffering:
and the families of the victims
will say
Let God be the judge…
But the speaker’s petty personal circumstances take more complete possession of the conclusion of the poem – a little spell of curtain-twitching on a Ballymena housing estate. How much do you really care about the moral illiteracy of a BBC obituary when your wheelie bin has just been made off with, in plain sight, by your next door neighbour?
but all I can think of
is how my neighbours
who I thought were good neighbours
have stolen my red kerbie bin
after last night’s storm
even though it had my house number
painted on the side
and there it is, sitting in their backyard.
(‘An Unpleasant Corner of Hell’, p.241)
And so, the godfather of all godfathers has been eclipsed by a Mid & East Antrim Borough Council wheelie bin.
‘Cutting’ slyly alludes to Heaney’s ‘Digging’. Allen recollects the efforts of his father (‘leaving… the garden a cut-up mess’), not at all like Heaney’s skilled farmer father, and beside himself with shame at being ‘hopeless in the face of menial chores’. Allen presents an update on the perennial business of man handing on misery to man:
he has adapted his ways
forcing discomfort into anger
the sudden slamming door
the quick smarting slap
the physical force of an animal at odds with itself.
(‘Cutting’, p.236)
The scruffy cutting remembered of Allen’s father is not like the neatly productive nicking and slicing remembered of Heaney’s father. ‘Cutting’ tells of an expansive type of self-harm that shapes a family, and a community, and the man must be rare who has never behaved so.
A significant share of Allen’s pessimism is grounded in intimate knowledge of human behaviour – not least his father’s. As Paul McDonald puts it in his fine introduction, ‘the father’s mindset – his lack of self-awareness, understanding, or ambition – is indicative of many adults Allen saw around him growing up in mid-twentieth-century Ballymena’ (p.17). From such a point of view, Allen has sustained a vision of life which is giddily flawless and relatable. Frequently, the Allen insight can make it out of the dark like Thomas Hardy, or Arthur Schopenhauer, via Thomas Ligotti’s Conspiracy Against the Human Race:
These are cows that move dumbly
across the gorse and thistles,
but they could be human
alive in their own streams of piss
their inattention to what surrounds them
(‘North of Nowhere’, p.63)
And the revelation that the roots of any given suicide are lost ultimately in the psychology of Judas Iscariot (‘On the Nature of Hanging’, p.200) is weirdly and unsettlingly compelling. Allen gets under the skin of the subject as if he has taken it captive and made it his own.
McDonald is right to say that Bukowski has influenced Allen, and he is also right to imply that Allen is bigger and better than Bukowski. Baudelaire said once that he would only have been able to write the work worthy of his genius if someone held a gun to his head, forcing him to apply himself unremittingly to the realisation of masterly achievement. Gary Allen, it seems, would never have produced his fifteen volumes of amazing poetry had he not been pressurised from the inside out by all the unspeakable bloodshed we have been instructed to ‘move on’ from. Against the Stream: Selected Poems 2003-2021 is more poignant, demanding, raw and coherent than any other vision of Northern Ireland you will find. Allen should be much better known. When he is as well-known as he should be, other writers, historians, politicians and so on will at least be able to try to catch up.
May 10 2025
London Grip Poetry Review – Gary Allen
Poetry review – AGAINST THE STREAM: Andrew Keanie considers a comprehensive selection of Gary Allen’s poetry and sets it in the context of Northern Ireland’s troubled history
Here, in the part of the European archipelago involving Great Britain and Ireland known to some as Ulster, to others as Northern Ireland, and to others as the north of Ireland, the agitation of identities, the feeling of claustrophobia and the legacy of the lowered horizon have shaped sectarian attitudes to writers and writings. Here is a province that has for a long time been dourly consumed by its own internal condition. ‘No place in the world’, as Seamus Heaney said, ‘prides itself more on its vigilance and realism, no place considers itself more qualified to censure any flourish of rhetoric or extravagance of aspiration’.
In Northern Ireland in the 1970s and 1980s, when the shooting and bombing was talking the talk and the goose-stepping was walking the walk, good poets needed to get the hell out. There was not much point in trying to craft language and line when the real movers and shakers were hard at it. There was not much point in keeping your head when those around you might blow it off and blame it on you. Derek Mahon’s ‘Afterlives’ (1975) remains a caustic avowal of the necessity of exile for any Northern Irish poet.
If you were, like Mahon, buzzing with Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Nerval and Rilke, you would only have found yourself wasting good thinking and writing time, coping mechanistically among the security alerts, competing narratives and pointless atrocities. You would only have been consenting to the general flattening of thought and speech into the stony rubbish of the sectarian wasteland, the country of the bombed in which the one-idea man is king.
Despite its fractured identity and fucked-up activities, N/northern Ireland collectively retained its utilitarian aspiration. It seemed to implore, with the best will in the world: what use is there in a writer whose best energies do not fly out into the fray with humanitarian tenacity? Or, as Heaney had it put to him, on a train, by a bomber-writer bumptiously sure of himself as promoter of the worthier half of the crisis, ‘When, for fuck’s sake, are you going to write / Something for us?’
Nuance was effectively cancelled. Modesty was a myth exploded. Revulsion at the Widgery whitewashing of Bloody Sunday (the atrocity involving paratroopers dispatched, by public school boys, to Derry to kill innocent people in 1972), tempted Thomas Kinsella to reduce the situation to something only Catholics (and maybe one or two repentant Protestants) could agree was actually the case. Kinsella got rid of the temptation by yielding to it. His caricature of Protestants remains strikingly written, fierily insistent, and deficient in deep subjectivity. In publishing ‘Butcher’s Dozen’ (1974), he may have disqualified himself from the mainstream UK literary scene for the rest of his life, but the canard about Protestants would prove as lasting as many antisemitic lies (Jews are animals, fat bankers, corruptors, vampires, warmongers or devil worshippers). Kinsella’s force allows no counter argument. The confirmation bias is so unflinchingly exact:
If Kinsella’s planted, flag-waving, squamous Protestant did not quite acquire authentication in the British-Irish economy of political emphasis, there was an oft-repeated nod to the wise that Protestants were on the wrong, and Catholics on the right, side of history.
So it was something of a relief when, in 2004, Alan Gillis delivered such a darkly satirical vision of all the ‘progress’ allegedly made by light-hearted and high-minded terrorists-turned-politicians.
They say that for years Belfast was backwards and it’s great now to see some progress. So I guess we can look forward to taking boxes from the earth. I guess that ambulances will leave the dying back amidst the rubble to be explosively healed. Given time, one hundred thousand particles of glass will create impossible patterns in the air before coalescing into the clarity of a window. Through which, a reassembled head will look out and admire the shy young man taking his bomb from the building and driving home. (‘Progress’, Somebody, Somewhere 2004)Gillis, who surely learned the strange aesthetics of narrative in reverse from Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow or Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, extended the province of ways in which it was permissible for Troubles-focused poetry to be written.
Enter Gary Allen, whose poetry is so idiosyncratic and ambitious, and so uninterested in contributing, or even paying lip service, to the longstanding literary whinge of Irish nationalism.
Why do you throw stones and petrol bombs? he asked, For fun, we shrugged, grinning sheepishly as though caught on a border between what has always been for us, and what is new. (‘Jesus Clocks In’, p.218)It is not clear in the above lines who is throwing the stones and petrol bombs, and it is not clear what ‘border’ they are ‘caught / on’. The reader is free to infer. But try pinning ‘what has always been for us’ or ‘what is new’ down to one meaning. The poem seems to allow room between the lines for the reader to insert his or her own predilections and prejudices. Despite ‘we’ and ‘us’, this is Troubles-focused poetry speaking with refreshing respect for the individual mind.
Allen looks at life not with an agenda but from a coherent individuality.
Sometimes, in a moment, the mind gets a rush like a train entering and leaving a short tunnel like the first time I saw a bomb going off the excruciating silence, then the strange barking of dogs before the pavement began to tremble under your feet and the buildings shuddered, followed by a deafening bang the crazy sound of sirens, walls imploding, screams dust billowing out like sea clouds the million flapping shredded office blinds – and I didn’t realise until much later that I was bleeding, streaming down my face it all seemed so impersonal that I never thought of blaming anyone… (‘The Wide Blue Yonder’, p.206).He is not saying he has the whole truth. He is showing that he is entangled in the truth. He does not have every answer, but he is effectively endorsing a profusion of partially determined issues, the nature of which invites contemplation rather than calls for ‘closure’.
In May 2022, Prime Minister Boris Johnston’s announcement of plans to ‘draw a line under the Troubles’ by ending all prosecutions relating to the Troubles before 1998 was a nifty little move, as if with our best interests at heart – a Swiftian little policy, a modest proposal to bamboozle us with down-to-earth banality, while the amazing constellation of unsolved crimes glitters good-humouredly and out of reach over our pretty troubled little heads.
Allen’s poetry is a very civilized response to the recent rumpus of delusion, credulity and ‘conflict-resolution’. It is a wisely-layered articulation of an adrenalized clarity unwelcome in the recently-agreed N/northern Ireland: people formerly known for causing explosions in our public places are now our peace pundits, and we are to accept the words they speak now rather than question the things they have done in the past. Have the bombs become less bombly recollected in tranquillity? Is the lasting devastation less devastating wrapped in our new peaceniks’ platitudes? Maybe all the people still living lives ripped to pieces should put their misfortunes down to mysterious causes and move on:
caught in that fear of the unseen, the unknown like whether my father would come back from working on the border or my mother die in flames at the back of a firebombed shop or playing games coming home from school as to which car would be the one to explode. (‘The Monster’, p.260)Allen’s poetry enacts the emotional intelligence of the ordinary individual brought up in Northern Ireland during the troubles: vigilant and realistic, yet as free in imagination as anyone anywhere else. For example, in ‘The Graves’ (from the collection Jackson’s Corner) we find Allen’s recollected childhood experience of witnessing a bomb explode; it feels so deeply personal and yet is also such a finely perceptive recollection of a child’s pure (not yet politicised) point of view:
This is writing that belongs to the compressed condition of your last minute. Allen is so in command of his subject it seems as if he is the subject. His is an almost instantly recognisable northern Irish voice, full of hard disturbing realism and something dreamlike too. It can sound for a line or two like the vexing whine of a Ballymena street preacher, but it can just as readily deepen, in the next couple of lines, into something more mind-expanding.
You who think you know God Think again lie close to the wall of your thinking listen to the rattle in his anger. (‘The Next Room’, p.119)Allen’s voice is that of an unaffiliated citizen with nothing much to say about either the big political fantasy of Irish republicanism or the major media outlets that oxygenised its violent life before collapsing with it into a sort of arts centre exhibition.
Allen finds in his own incredulity hidden confirmation of an odd angle from which life can be looked at. He has no need to intensify resentment. The vision, as it is, fumes with visual intensity. Yes, the reader is briefly reminded of a whole world of unfashionable suffering:
But the speaker’s petty personal circumstances take more complete possession of the conclusion of the poem – a little spell of curtain-twitching on a Ballymena housing estate. How much do you really care about the moral illiteracy of a BBC obituary when your wheelie bin has just been made off with, in plain sight, by your next door neighbour?
but all I can think of is how my neighbours who I thought were good neighbours have stolen my red kerbie bin after last night’s storm even though it had my house number painted on the side and there it is, sitting in their backyard. (‘An Unpleasant Corner of Hell’, p.241)And so, the godfather of all godfathers has been eclipsed by a Mid & East Antrim Borough Council wheelie bin.
‘Cutting’ slyly alludes to Heaney’s ‘Digging’. Allen recollects the efforts of his father (‘leaving… the garden a cut-up mess’), not at all like Heaney’s skilled farmer father, and beside himself with shame at being ‘hopeless in the face of menial chores’. Allen presents an update on the perennial business of man handing on misery to man:
he has adapted his ways forcing discomfort into anger the sudden slamming door the quick smarting slap the physical force of an animal at odds with itself. (‘Cutting’, p.236)The scruffy cutting remembered of Allen’s father is not like the neatly productive nicking and slicing remembered of Heaney’s father. ‘Cutting’ tells of an expansive type of self-harm that shapes a family, and a community, and the man must be rare who has never behaved so.
A significant share of Allen’s pessimism is grounded in intimate knowledge of human behaviour – not least his father’s. As Paul McDonald puts it in his fine introduction, ‘the father’s mindset – his lack of self-awareness, understanding, or ambition – is indicative of many adults Allen saw around him growing up in mid-twentieth-century Ballymena’ (p.17). From such a point of view, Allen has sustained a vision of life which is giddily flawless and relatable. Frequently, the Allen insight can make it out of the dark like Thomas Hardy, or Arthur Schopenhauer, via Thomas Ligotti’s Conspiracy Against the Human Race:
These are cows that move dumbly across the gorse and thistles, but they could be human alive in their own streams of piss their inattention to what surrounds them (‘North of Nowhere’, p.63)And the revelation that the roots of any given suicide are lost ultimately in the psychology of Judas Iscariot (‘On the Nature of Hanging’, p.200) is weirdly and unsettlingly compelling. Allen gets under the skin of the subject as if he has taken it captive and made it his own.
McDonald is right to say that Bukowski has influenced Allen, and he is also right to imply that Allen is bigger and better than Bukowski. Baudelaire said once that he would only have been able to write the work worthy of his genius if someone held a gun to his head, forcing him to apply himself unremittingly to the realisation of masterly achievement. Gary Allen, it seems, would never have produced his fifteen volumes of amazing poetry had he not been pressurised from the inside out by all the unspeakable bloodshed we have been instructed to ‘move on’ from. Against the Stream: Selected Poems 2003-2021 is more poignant, demanding, raw and coherent than any other vision of Northern Ireland you will find. Allen should be much better known. When he is as well-known as he should be, other writers, historians, politicians and so on will at least be able to try to catch up.