“His poetry sandblasts the brain and bleaks the emotions until what’s left is A Motley To The View: . . . a blur landscape of the ruins outside and the absurd within.  Here, poetry becomes a wildcat virus, implanted directly into the emotional bloodstream through the sheer aesthetic beauty of the language but only really reactivated later when the impossible meanings of the text slip their way into consciousness.  And when that happens, when A Motley To The View reconfigures the eye and stakes claim to the psycho-geography of the reader’s imagination, then we’re finally present at the real literary feast of Allen Bell:  poetry as an incredible fury of meaning written in words that have all the purity and simplicity and the incommensurability that have always been the sign of the hoped-for appearance of being human in the now triumphant culture of the post-human.”                

Arthur Kroker

Review