About the Book:

"Gary Allen is one of the more urgent and accurate writers now writing."
- Sebastian Barker

"Gary Allen is at home in his language, he knows how to make its rhythms resonate to
his pain. Allen writes with a controlled assurance that earns the reader's trust."
- Frances Thompson

"Allen's voice is powerful, creative and original."
- J.D. Ballam

"Allen is an author who knows exactly what he is going to say, and possessed of a rare
poetic faci!ity with which to say it."
- David Woefield


These are your father's hands
swift tattooed and smelling of rosewood

see how they swing in the light
two great hammers, Moses and Abraham

they throw you to the sky
a wicker basket, a lead bucket

only once, lest you think life is trivial
- from 'Stony Ground'


Gary Allen is one of the most intriguing and interesting of the younger generation
of Ulster poets.

With an eye for the telling image and an ear closely tuned for the rhythms and tones
of his Ballymena upbringing, Allen painfully explores in this collectionboth his and his
chosen people's imaginative past.

And yet underlying Allen's unfussy truthfulness, the poet also displays a compassion
for the people who inhabit his poems. This is an Ulster Protestant world at once haunted
by, but also irredeemably shot through with, the possibilities of liberation.

By turns deeply moving and excoriating, The Bone House shows Allen at the height of
his abilities, charting and creating a landscape inextricably his own but also one familiar
to the reader.

About the Author:

Gary Allen was born in Ballymena, Co. Antrim in 1959. After leaving college he travelled and work throughout Europe, settling in Holland for some years before returning to Northern Ireland. He has published four collections of poetry: Languages (Flambard/Black Mountain Press, 2002), Exile (Black Mountain Press, 2004), North of Nowhere (2006) and Iscariot's Dream (2008). He has also published a novel, Cillin (2005).