miming happiness

reviews

"Allison McVety's follow up to 2007's The Night Trotsky Came to Stay is a paean to the everyday, managing at once to capture the banality and magic of schools days, moving house, working life and family. What is most striking about this collection is the efficiency of the language used – Occam’s razor has been applied effectively here, and the wonderfully stark images conjured up by such terse lines as “we freeze together and separate, verticals;” (from Family Trees) tell of a poet at the height of her powers."
PBS Bulletin

"McVety, the poet of solid things, reveals the wish ‘to crumble away’ into the ‘infinitely small’. Her final poem is a
vision of inwardness: ‘the atom/ cracking with the thunder of a goldcrest’s heart’. It is an astounding line. Allison
McVety’s collection reveals the uncontainable power of poetry."
Alison Brackenbury, PN Review

"Allison McVety seizes the reader's attention. Partly it's a narrative talent, but Allison McVety's particular skill is in converting the feel of day-to-day experience past and present – whether ordinary, intriguing or alarming – into
genuine poetry."
Alan Brownjohn

"Her particular strength is her ability to fuse observation with imagination, to merge the specific with the abstract. However her finely-phrased observations are not forced to bear the weight of reflections on broader issues; rather the images have been carefully selected such that the poem’s meaning emanates naturally from the material."
Jason Menios, Eyewear

"While The Night Trotsky Came to Stay mined the past (and her dreams of gold barges oaring their way to Avalon”) this new collection revels in the present - hymns translating to glory the everyday struggles of ordinary people."
Keith Richmond, Tribune

"Let Allison McVety be your guide through the industrial landscape of the last century for hers is a voice that is deft, measured and unfaltering in the face of 'liquid history’, yet always with an eye for the human: the train drivers, button keepers and those on the night shift. Here is a poet who excels at making long-gone everyday objects like ration books
at once endearing and remarkable. An exhilarating follow-up to her outstanding collection, The Night Trotsky Came to
Stay. So clear is her voice that we can hear ‘a pin drop from a milliner’s grip some ninety years/away'."
Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch