About 4 — Arthur Allen

Twenty Twenty:
Treatments for Cut Flowers
‘Arthur Allen writes about grief with great honesty, generosity and beauty. In the "season / when all friends may and do die daily", this is a timely and necessary book of finely crafted poetry for everyone reeling from the loss of someone of "extraordinary dearness". These poems make you want to memorize and treasure lines on every page, and draw you to return and marvel at them again and again.’
Laura Theis, author of How to extricate yourself

Runner-up out of 12,000 entries in the Erbacce Prize for Poetry.
Poems from the collection have been highly commended in the Wells Festival of Literature Prize 2021, chosen as finalists in the Malahat Review Open Season Poetry Award 2021, shortlisted for the 2021 Jane Martin Poetry Prize and longlisted for the Dead Cat Poetry Prize 2021.
Read more on the Poetry and Covid website, which fosters and supports public conversation about poetry as a response to Covid-19.
Signed copies available now from erbacce-press.

‘Treatment for Cut Flowers reveals the power that can be found in offering up the personal. The book is a rare, intimate glance behind the curtain of mourning and remembering. Rooted in but transcending the year of its title, it offers up a chorus of voices that are able to serve as a light for our darkest moments.’

Sam Moore, All my teachers died of AIDS

The Nurseryman

‘An extraordinary debut that combines the awed wonder of early seafarers with a freshness and buoyancy that is essentially 21st century. Alternating between the late sixteenth century ‘FRAGMENTARY records of a Roote Gatherer, practiced of alchemical craft & in the spiritual use of fruit trees…’, lyrical meditations on the beauty of nature, and notes on the marvels encountered during the voyage, The Nurseryman takes us on a startlingly original odyssey that is at once an homage to the past as well as being a prescient ‘fable for the present.’
Jenny Lewis, author of Gilgamesh Retold
Longlisted, the Welsh International Poetry Book Award 2020.
Winner, the Eyelands Book Awards Poetry Prize 2019.
Third Place, Charter Oak Award for Best Historical 2019.
The Voyage of a Novel in Verse: An Interview with Arthur Allen.
Buy it here from Kernpunkt Press.

The Nurseryman is no mere survey of the intrepidity, hubris and horror associated with the northward course of old empire: far from enacting a parasitic relation to historical, scientific and folkloric corpora, Allen’s sinuous polyvocal navigation of manifold formal and discursive realms restores to intimate proximity the specters of long gone voyagers.

I.S. Rowley, The Undeliverable

Here Birds Are
‘I have not read anything like this, so intimate and also vast. These are wonderful poems, truly moving and beautifully written, with a great variousness in them.’
- Michael Ondaatje, author of The English Patient
Semi-finalist, the Claudia Emerson Chapbook Award 2016.
Highly-commended, the Fools for Poetry Chapbook Competition 2016.
Poems from the pamphlet were selected as finalists for the Phyllis Smart-Young Prize 2017 and the Mississippi Review Poetry Prize 2017, and long-listed for the Canberra International Poetry Prize.

Buy it here from Green Bottle Press.

It catches the raw edges of mourning, its self-consciousness – as if you might, somehow, be doing it wrong. The poems are tender, at times distractingly beautiful, and shy away from overstatement. … Here birds are reminds me of Emily Berry’s Stranger, Baby, and, to some extent, Ocean Vuong’s Night Sky With Exit Wounds, though Allen’s style is his alone. He’s written both a heartfelt elegy and a really distinctive array of poems, full of continuously surprising attention, “preserved / in love.”

Becky Varley-Winter, Sabotage Reviews