Graham Allen: Without Covenant
- Free
- Bantry Bookshop
- 15/07/2024 - 11:30 am
Graham Allen’s new collection of poetry, Without Covenant, will be published by Salmon Poetry in 2024. The collection presents its readers with a picture of a poet struggling with disability (specifically Parkinson’s Disease) without what it takes to be the false comforts of religion, especially the idea of the covenant or promise of protection, guidance, and providential design. Chance, contingency, and an impending sense of the imminent arrival of the worst, are the sole remaining powers in the universe of Graham Allen’s imagination, and yet they are still met by a stubborn refusal on the part of the poet to cease in the pursuit of beauty, hope, and meaning.
Graham will be in conversation with Jennifer deBie
We are then, in a second section, taken back to the days of punk, skinheads, the Falklands War, and the poet’s struggles to practically and intellectually escape from his upbringing in the Salvation Army. A third section, expanding the concept of covenant out into the foundation of the modern American imaginary, a purposefully allusive poetry guides this book’s readers through the numerous self-betrayals of the contemporary United States of America (the last nation to be founded upon the idea of a special covenant with God) back towards the call of a wounded nature, and the still discernible imperatives of community, friendship, and love.
Writers
Writer
Graham Allen
Writer
