artemis - gill mcavoy
There is notable confidence in Allison McVety’s precise poems. She covers a wide range of subjects: the school chemistry lab, buttons, working lives, typewriters, back yards, northern towns, pathology, and little black dresses.
Rites of passage feature, large and small: in Little Black Dresses women “step out of marriages and motherhood” as they try on clothes to “wear their real lives for an hour”. In Experiment a jet of water hoses a girl “just above her Playtex, as yet unfumbled”. Time is also a subtle underlying theme: in Head Count time is suspended for the “chill of rumour is in the air”; the office workers are waiting to know who is next to lose their job while the “doors are already turning, turning people out to grass”. Time is occasionally turned upside down as in the poem Night Shift where the staff find that years spent “dragging in the seasons prematurely as we do with Xmas crackers, BBQs, keep us always out of time”.
The language is crisp. It is also spare. The poem And Another Thing where the dead turn up where they’re not wanted lets us know succinctly that her father probably died of a heart attack for, as she is busy looking for flour on the supermarket shelves, “my father, hand on his heart, was checking the labels for salt.” Allison McVety tells her truths in sly, definitely “slant”, manner, but with touching affection and wry humour.
Published in Artemis June 2011