Blue Glass Cities

by Mark Allinson

"In my own blue glass city I sometimes hear

a sound like the pulse of surf quite near."

A finely-observed physical landscape dominates Mark Allinson's poetry: gritty, gnarly, windswept—the sand dunes, breakers, tussocks, seed-pods and bleached bones of the rugged New South Wales south coast. But these poems also map a spiritual terroir no less difficult, impressive and awkwardly beautiful: the poetry is witty, bumptious, inconvenient, necessary, real, true. If I were to imagine a Mark Allinson poem as a physical object, it would be as a wind-and-tide-smoothed piece of driftwood, elegant and grainy, worn by time into something beautiful and enduring. Allinson achieves all this through a meticulous but unobtrusive craftsmanship: this is verse for those who like to sip their poetry neat. Mark Allinson can be a terrible pain in the arse, but he writes like an angel.

(Paul Stevens, editor: The Flea)