If, as the aphorist once quipped, wisdom in the young is as unattractive as frivolity in the elderly, young poets have a tough gig. In our culture there is a premium placed on youth, but the truth is that in any generation there are only a handful of voices worth listening to: poets who – through disposition, intellect, circumstance, commitment to their art and the odd stroke of luck – write those few poems that ring true and refuse to be forgotten. Great poems are as likely to be penned by a 30-year-old as a 70-year-old. Faber’s New Poets series provides mentorship, financial support and pamphlet publication to four previously unpublished poets. Its first two outings paved the way for talents such as Fiona Benson and Sam Riviere. Now it is the turn of this latest four to receive the mixed blessing of heightened critical scrutiny, public attention and general promotion afforded to few debutants.
At 25, Rachael Allen is the youngest: a fact that helps explain her poetry’s up-to-the-minute contemporaneity, alternative humour, and occasional shoulder-shrugging cool. Dotted throughout her short collection is a series of poems that takes its cues from the internet-meme-generating 4chan website: “Random”, “Cute/Male”, “Social”. If that means nothing to you, you’re not alone. But while these conversational snapshots are littered with in-jokes and non sequiturs, they also transcend their specifics, to grapple with universals such as love, loss and childhood nostalgia. It makes for moving, often funny reading: “the tacky smell of sweets that could have been lipgloss” at a time when “Gina G was the pathway to enlightenment”. Allen’s is a sceptical, droll outlook, but she isn’t afraid of occasional profundity. “Early Harbour” is a painfully beautiful lyric that charts difficult waters, while “Goonhilly” casts a wry eye over our past lives, making the eponymous telecommunications site a metaphor for life’s chances and choices: “She asks about radar and you will conclude it is dangerous / … isn’t anything we can’t see?”
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