| Fergus Allen was born in London in 1921, of an Anglo-Irish father and an English mother. After childhood and Quaker schools in Ireland, he read engineering at Trinity College, Dublin, where he wrote light verse for the college magazine; he now regards this as useful training in the nuts and bolts of his craft. During the second world war, he moved to England to work as a civil engineer, eventually as Director of the Hydraulics Research Station, before his transfer into the Cabinet Office as a Whitehall civil servant. He ended his professional career as First Civil Service Commissioner.
Since retirement from the Civil Service he has published four collections: The Brown Parrots of Providencia (Faber 1993), Who goes there? (Faber 1996), Mrs Power looks over the Bay (Faber 1999) and Gas, Light and Coke ( Dedalus 2006).
Fergus Allen has described himself as a gloomy poet ("I wouldn't be a proper poet if I wasn't gloomy") but the severity of some of his work masks a glinting and glittering humour. In 'Flies and Nettles', his vision of the brevity of mankind's existence before the earth is taken over by flies and nettles is, in his reading, like an uncle terrifying the children with a horror story for bedtime. In 'The Lives of the Cousins', influenced like so much of his work by life in Ireland, he imagines the splendid world of his wealthy cousins as hinted at in black and white photographs. Then he mildly settles down to the reality of small-town Ireland and the solicitor's pink-cheeked secretary's reassuringly thick legs. This is not autobiographical or confessional - none of his work is so simple - but it does reflect his own wry and self-deprecating outlook on life, perfectly captured in his tone of voice as he reads the poem.
He adopts many masks; several of his poems are about living life as an outsider looking in. In 'Parental Guidance' the outsiderness is that of a child who was never prepared for the mystery of Mr Ganly ("genial over the porridge and haddock") having had noisy sex with Mrs Ganly the night before - audible through the child's bedroom wall. As the poem continues, this comedy of embarrassment turns into a chilling vision of himself watching life from a sterile room, hands enclosed in rubber gloves, drafting 'a protocol of separation'.
Beyond his memories of growing up in Ireland, his not-suffering-fools verbal precision, his delight in the ways words can work, Fergus Allen gives a truthful and compelling account of a long life lived with eyes open, musing on the oddity of things. His voice in these recordings is precise, almost schoolmasterly, with a touch of Irish blarney; he invites the listener to sit up straight and pay attention but not necessarily always to take him too seriously.
1. Other 01.46
2. The Brown Parrots of Providencia 01.08
3. Tanks in Moscow 01.08
4. Foreign Relations 01.24
5. Actor in Mirror 01.23
6. Sodium Light 01.12
7. Wall of Death Bray 01.12
8. Flies and Nettles 01.34
9. Knight Errant 01.23
10. Modern Times 01.50
11. Blue Sky Dusty Horizon 01.24
12. When the Car Gave Up the Ghost 01.47
13. Who Goes There 01.24
14. A Time for Blushing 01.39
15. The Lives of the Cousins 02.22
16. To Be Read Before Being Born 00.27
17. A Young Protestant Lady 03.31
18. Parental Guidance 02.53
19. Fire 01.50
20. Waltzing with Veronica 00.44
21. The Visitant 02.57
22. Zennor 02.46
23. Eves Lament 00.31
24. Fancy Dress 00.41
25. Pontecorvo 02.04
26. After Pneumonia 01.30
27. Irises 00.31
28. At the Meeting of the Niles 02.59
29. Gas Light & Coke 02.29
30. Easterly 02.12
31. Battue 00.19
32. A Bad Debt (1842) 02.17
33. Grinzing 01.47
34. Death Sentences 01.23
Total length of the recording: 56.36
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