A Democracy of Poisons

Tim Allen lived for many years in Plymouth working as a primary school teacher. For two decades he helped, through the magazine Terrible Work and the Language Club reading series, to establish a vibrant poetry community. A Democracy of Poisons, a sequence of prose poems, is Tim Allen's third Shearsman book and his first completed work following a move to Lancashire where he has been heavily involved with the avant wing of the North-West poetry scene. The texts run parallel with the years of Austerity leading to Brexit and its fallout, issues internalised here before resurfacing within new narrative contexts and scenarios in which modern cultural history competes with autobiographical conflict to be transported elsewhere by the chimera of language. Motifs arising from the perspective of age and change echo, but sparsely; what really unites the poems is a cruel humour, as often self-directed as aimed at the democracy of poisons. "Tim Allen combines images with the anarchic verve of Lautréamont and the early Surrealists. The sentences which result are both playful and rebellious, generating quirky narrative threads which are soon subsumed again by the text. Each poem is a helter skelter rush of improvisation, an exercise in indeterminacy bounded only by the imposed 28 line, four stanzas form used throughout the book." -Simon Collings "Why does what they call high modernism have so much religion bronchial hymns and ripped sacking in it? There is a phase of childhood when the child does nothing but ask awkward questions, and Tim Allen may be an example of someone who never abandoned this phase. His unwillingness to retain the answers opened up a new world with new conventions. Are things really as they are or are they ceaselessly reformulated into moral patterns by the generalising powers of language? As the prose units of democracy of poisons develop, their polished and surreal surface becomes more and more convincing. The title presumably refers to a 24-hour media slew in which toxic ideas try to win popularity contests. There is a camaraderie of bad ideas." -Andrew Duncan