FERGUS ALLEN is now 84. After schools in Dublin and Waterford he read Engineering in Trinity College, Dublin, where he was also active in College societies and wrote light verse for the then College magazine, T.C.D., which he now describes as useful training. In the latter part of World War 2 economic necessity obliged him to move to England, where—apart from periodic visits to Ireland—he has lived ever since. He ended his professional career as First Civil Service Commissioner in the British civil service. He has had poems published sporadically throughout his adult life, but after his formal retirement he found himself writing much more actively. His first collection, The Brown Parrots of Providencia was published by Faber & Faber in 1993, and Who Goes There? and Mrs Power Looks Over the Bay followed in 1996 and 1999. He now lives with his wife (another Dubliner) in a village in Berkshire.

"This is beautiful writing; but it also has about it the savagery of the authentic. Allen does that rare thing: he adheres to the true north of poetry."
— Fiona Sampson, The Irish Times

"84 years young, Allen writes poetry that is limpid, very subtle and marvellously wise."
—William Boyd, summer 2006 reading recommendations, The Guardian

"[A] poet of technical mastery, sharp intelligence and profound thought... There is a grand sense of the universal in these keenly crafted, erudite pieces."
—Maria Johnston, Poetry Ireland Review

“His work has a sense of the contemporaneity of the past, of the ghosts that dwell among us.... Allen has the patience and refinement of a restorer, stripping down the familiar layers of hackneyed surface to show a world characterised by breathtaking colours and textures underneath.... Dip into this collection and its undertow soon drags you underwater”
—Jonathan Ellis, Metre