Thursday’s Fictions

1999

ISBN: 0864185960

pp120

Thursday’s Fictions’ big moral/metaphysical ‘week’ is a true achievement ... what I admire is the stamina, the clarity of soul, the willingness to ask hard questions.  This is the kind of poetry Alec Hope was (or should have been) looking for when he lamented the decline of the ‘discursive mode’.  It’s utterly different, I’m glad to say, from all those little OZ poems about a sensitive bloke walking out one morning and seeing the light shimmer on farmyard dams.

Chris Wallace-Crabbe, University of Melbourne

What is most immediately remarkable about the book is its stylistic range: Allen employs a variety of formal models, including stream-of-consciousness soliloquy, dramatic dialogue, as well as free verse and prose-poetry, with equal assurance and sophistication.

John Hawke, University of Wollongong

The Way Out At Last Cycle could become the greatest symbolist poem in Australian literature.”                                    

David Gilbey, Charles Sturt University

Prizes

Shortlisted for the 2000 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards for Poetry,

the Kenneth Slessor Prize:

 In Thursday’s Fictions Allen is both playful and satirical, defiant and seductive, as he experiments with the possibilities of poetry as performance, utterance and text. The book combines highly contemporary inflexions of language with ancient and classical modes of writing, creating an extended dialogue of self and soul.

The judges for Poetry, NSW Premier’s Literary Award