Allison McVety
Winner of The Poetry Business Book & Pamphlet Competition 2006, Allison’s collection, The Night Trotsky Came to Stay
(Smith/Doorstop, 2007), was shortlisted for the Forward Best First Collection Prize. Her poems have appeared in The
Times and PN Review and have been broadcast on BBC radio as well as appearing in the Forward Poems of the
Decade 2002-2011. Allison has an MA in Poetry and was shortlisted for the MMU Poetry Prize 2008. Her second collection,
Miming Happiness (Smith/Doorstop), was published in 2010. She read at Ledbury and Aldeburgh Poetry Festivals in 2011.
Image by Derek Adams
"A poet at the height of her powers" Poetry Book Society
In the reading room at the British Library
you can hear the sea. And in this noiseless place,
a pin drop from a milliner’s grip some ninety years
away, or a wren caught in the eaves of a sudden thought.
There’s a finger, sweat greasing its trigger at dawn
as it eases back to join the volley of twelve Enfields
in the yard, dust falling from the walls as we all
fall in time. A rage of sound exalted to stillness
and it carries down the decades. Even after-hours
the librarians whisper here, afraid to weigh their loss
or private joy against the din. As though one
misplaced word could creak like a nightingale
on a parquet floor, jar like a note in a symphony
of counted bars at rest, could make you miss the atom
cracking with the thunder of a goldcrest’s heart.