BLUE GLASS CITIES by Mark Allison

In my own blue glass city I sometimes hear
a sound like the pulse of surf quite near.

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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)

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Staple Bound Chapbook
17 pages
Originally published by Modern Metrics Press