Psychic Unrest
by Lillian Allen
Insomniac Press,
1999
Reviewed by Anne Lumley
In Psychic Unrest, Lillian Allen creates vivid images for the
eyes and ears, often simultaneously.
highest register on
the alto string of the cello
curls inside your ears
(from "Sapelo Island")
blues riffs running
like a river
into the greens of
ocean
("Fall Fall Falling")
It is good to see and hear through her work, to know where she has
been. Her journey has taken her from Jamaica to hear the rhythms of the
dance and the music of the voice as she moved to Newfoundland and then
to Ontario. There, in "The Broken of a Black Man," the police
systematically break and fall and innocent black man, a father, finally,
in front of his family, all of this in living, tragic rhythm.
a sound from the vicinity
of the young child's chest a bird's voice
they put my daddy
to kneel
they put my daddy
to kneel down beside the sofa and shoot him
they shoot my dadeee
You feel it in your face, your heart, your memory. And Lillian Allen
is incisive.
how could it be that
no one goes to jail
for the crime of Apartheid
("The Wait of
History")
There is joy there, too, and vision. In "Rasta in Court"
the rasta's defense in court against running into a policeman because
he had to light on his bike is that the light of Babylon lights his way,
and if the policeman had had his own light of Babylon within, he would've
been able to see the rasta coming.
Psychic Unrest moves . . .
handful of hot plastered
rock
pluck on collar-bone
("Black Hips").
. . . strong and soulful and true. A good read.
Anne Lumley
lives somewhere in Ontario with various farm animals.
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