Alyson Hallett holds nothing back in The Brilliant Girl. Her poems inhabit an unruly cosmos where boundaries between one thing and another dissolve, reconfigure, disappear. At the root of this shimmering rip in shape-shifting reality is violence, an intrusion that shattered a girl's sense of being in the world.
The poems track the legacy of this violence through a variety of lenses including rage, love, resistance and repair. They lurch and lean, explode into joy, recoil into donkeys, playing the piano, expand out into trees and the constant call of the sea. Resisting sentiment, difficult truths are admitted, articulated and acted upon as the grown up girl confronts what it means to stand by her truth and resist fear.
An attack doesn't just happen once: it happens through time, it echoes, clangs, goes quiet, rebounds. These poems bring transparency to the continuing repercussions of violence: how it can be named, treated and transformed. It's as if Alyson Hallett has found a way of giving a wound a mouth and asking what it wants to say. Be shameless, it says. Be brilliant.
Praise for Alyson Hallett's poetry:
'Suddenly Everything is a book full of marvels in which Alyson Hallett sees the world –whether it’s a ‘hare in the moon’ in Mexico, the detritus of Istanbul, or the cliffs, footpaths, beaches, and wildlife of her native England — as if for the first time. Her freshness of vision and freedom of spirit are in the great Romantic tradition, yet she has shaped her own unique sensibility and crafted enduring verse from her questing soul, perceptive eye, and wonderful ear for music.' – James Harpur
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