Tim Allen’s latest investigation into language and the world is made up of 97 short poems, each comprising a couplet of sorts. We’ve been here before I think. You can read these pieces through as playful interjections, philosophical speculations or as refusals to ‘play the game’ in any traditional manner. Tom Jenks in a back-cover blurb to another recent collection (Allen is nothing if not prolific) describes him as ‘a wizard.’ Here is a page of the book, chosen more or less at random and this provides enough material for a ‘critique’ or commentary of some kind:

16. invisible duty

Waiting for the firework display – trees fidget

Further into the forest memory is sleeping

A dream is all interiorlikea calf on a cattle trail

A novel minus its empty rooms and hitchhiking fish

17. invisible journey

Nothing in particular was still hanging around

Surrounded by bitching sticklers…