Miming Happiness

"Allison McVety's follow up to 2007's

The Night Trotsky Came to Stay is a paean to the everyday." – Poetry Book Society"

Miming Happiness's final section is collected into almost magical intensity. McVety's long lines describe her sister's mysterious illness, with lovely glances of sound, and the energy of verbs: 'on she swims, a shiver/ a shine, surfacing for air; slip-streaming the light'. Closing rhythms pulse with a town's life: 'the factories [..] breathe out, breathe in, go on'. McVety, the poet of solid things, reveals the wish 'to crumble away' into the 'infinitely small'. Her final poem is a vision of inwardness: 'the atom/ cracking with the thunder of a goldcrest's heart'. It is an astounding line. The best of Allison McVety's collection reveals the uncontainable power of poetry.' – Alison Brackenbury,

PN Review