Lighthouses

Allison McVety’s first collection, The Night Trotsky Came to Stay (Smith/Doorstop, 2007), was the overall winner of the 2006 Book & Pamphlet Competition, and was shortlisted for the Forward Best First Collection Prize 2008. Her poems have appeared in The Times, The Guardian, Poetry Review and Poetry London, have been broadcast on BBC radio and anthologised in the Forward Poems of the Decade 20022011 and The Best British Poetry 2013. A second collection, Miming Happiness, was published in 2010. In 2011 Allison won the National Poetry Competition and in 2013 was recorded at the Southbank Centre for the Poetry Library’s 60th anniversary. 'Allison McVety’s third collection is built around her National Poetry Competition winning poem, ‘To the Lighthouse’, an account of the poet’s revisit to Woolf’s text after her mother’s death. Lighthouses, then, is a book of new clarity and revelations, mothers, fathers and ghosts of the past. McVety’s talent is for sensuous detail, meticulously crafted moments and a grasp of rhythm that makes her work begin to read like memories of your own. Prizewinning poems aside, this collection is packed full with beacons of light.' — Poetry Book Society