My review of Alan Buckley's Still

My review of Alan Buckley's new collection, Still (Blue Diode Press, 2025), is now up at The Friday Poem. You can read it in full via this link, but here's a snippet to whet your appetite...
The coherent and cogent use of syllabics in English cannot ignore the natural stresses, the iambs and trochees, the anapests and dactyls – all surging and ebbing within a syllabic framework that offers a quieter music just below those stresses...

Might and maybe, Alan Buckley's Touched

Long-awaited has become a tacky term, its soul ripped out by marketing bods who desperately hunt a unique selling point for a poet, only to find it’s ubiquitous and emptied of any meaning. However, there are still certain moments when it really is valid. One such is the publication of Alan Buckley’s first full collection, Touched (HappenStance Press, 2020).

Buckley’s work is riven from experience, both of poetry and life. As a consequence, his verse eschews facile certainties, setting out its stall early on in this book, in the poem Life Lessons, which assumes the format of a Q&A:

…How do I live without being touched?

Your skin will be become stainless steel.

How do I learn to survive in a vacuum?

Don’t move. Don’t breathe. Don’t feel.

Of course, this poem’s significance is also signposted by its reference to the collection’s title. Moreover, its human questions, which are met by inhuman replies, implicitly encourage the protagonist and the reader to explore far more human routes. As such, these lines represent a statement of intent, the poet setting out on his quest.

In technical terms, meanwhile, what’s left unsaid is far more important than what’s actually stated. This requires a linguistic and thematic lightness of touch that in turn demands maturity. In other words, Buckley has left behind any need to prove himself via fireworks. Instead, he’s inviting us to accompany him on a journey of self-discovery through these poems, enabling us to reflect on our own lives in the process.

As mentioned above, the disappearance of certainty is pivotal to an understanding of Touched. Nuancing is present in each and every poem in the collection, and is often represented by the invocation of two key words: maybe and might. Here are several examples…

…Maybe, with patience,

both might be altered in some small way.

Or maybe we can’t be anything better than this…

(from Clocks)

“Maybe this is like that booth —

I’m Harry Dean Stanton and

you’re Nastassja Kinski….

…Or maybe I’m Natassja…

(from Confessional)

…Later, they might dress,

walk out for coffee at some café

down the road; or maybe not.

(from All That Matters)

“…Ordinary stuff, as if the years

to come were blank pages in a journal

that we might fill however we wanted…”

(from Things Can Only Get Better)

“…We part. I cycle down Cowley Road, mindful

of the oncoming buses as they swing out

to avoid the parked cars. It’s a glorious

July afternoon. Anything might happen.”

(from Cowley Road, 3.30 p.m.)

The last quote takes on added importance, as the action of the poem in question unfurls alongside the news of terrorist attacks in London. Buckley is unflinchingly portraying the best and worst of life, showing us how closely the two counterpoints co-exist, coming to the realisation that maturity and self-acceptance require our reconciliation with this fact.

Touched is a deeply moving collection, coherent and courageous in its poetic aesthetics and its attitude to human experience. Certainties are stripped of their facile attraction, while nuance is embraced throughout. Recommended! 

The ache of possibility, Alan Buckley's The Long Haul

Alan Buckley’s new pamphlet, The Long Haul (HappenStance Press, 2016), sets out its stall from the title onwards.

The afore-mentioned title works on two levels. On the one hand, it’s the closing words to a delicious poem called “Stalactites”. On the other, it’s an implicit reference to Buckley’s poetic journey. Following a well-received pamphlet back in 2009, this is only his second publication. He represents the antithesis of a careerist bright young thing.

Hard-earned, slow-burning skill runs throughout The Long Haul. The pacing of lines is so measured and precise that the craft and ear involved go almost unnoticed. One specific example of Buckley’s deft pacing is his use of qualifiers, as in the following extract from “Loch Ness”:

“…Better, surely, to have

the doubt, the ache of possibility.”

Meanwhile, in another poem, titled “His Failure”, Buckley takes those qualifiers a step further into altered repetition:

“… I felt

Like a god. No – scrub the indefinite article –

like God. My hangover, though, was two days of hell…”

Only an extremely talented and experienced poet can pull off this device and make it necessary to the poem in hand. Moreover, Buckley qualifies his statements not to undermine them but to layer them and grant them depth.

Aesthetic texturing works hand in hand with pivotal thematic concerns. Buckley portrays the long-learnt absence of absolutes in language and life. The kid, the student, the young lover are all gone and are all still there in the older man. He dares to feel, again and again, as in “Flame”:

“…And lovers know too

how even a single

flame might raise

a scar that time can’t heal.

So come, stand next to me;

let’s flip this little box.

Strike softly away from the body.

See how it urges us.”

Of course, the key here is the sudden rush of “urges” after two weak syllables, cadence melded to meaning.

This is an unusual pamphlet by an unusual poet, one who quietly grafts and grafts away, before presenting us with sure-footed piece after sure-footed piece. A first full collection by Alan Buckley would be a book to behold. For the moment and for a fair old time to come, we’ll have to savour these nineteen chiselled poems. After all, he’s in it for The Long Haul.