Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *

Bright lights attract the eye, the Neon Ghosts that blazes on the side of buildings, that pound at the door of the part of the brain that insists on stimuli, the advertising that entices you to investigate, the invitation highlighted by the texture, the colour and the magnetism that has been orchestrated into shape to make you see the radiance that is held within.

There are times when the neon may appear to glow with a type of heat that burns the mind, but as with many objects that call out to be heard, they are cold, phantasms of the razzle-dazzle, empty of promise, devoid of meaning except to act as the falseness of our times.

There are Neon Ghosts though that are anything but spectral images floating without purpose or serious intent, these are the dreams of those that see atmosphere and commitment, the illumination of intensity, and who with a single thought can make them stand out in rage of incandescent fire and will.

Moments come in poetry where a collection of work simply does more than overwhelm and make you perceive love, anger, fury, denial and solitude from a different angle, it catches you off guard, it threatens to tear down the walls of comfortable perspective, to act as a father confessor whilst embracing the lure of the stockinged leg and the drama of the smoking gun. Ezra Pound was such magician of this persuasive, antagonistic, concentration of words that burrowed into the hearts and minds of the minimalist verve, and with a flourish, Merseyside’s Alan Parry captures that illumination in his collection of poetry, Neon Ghosts.

It is in the remarkable precision, the stress of clarity and the dismissing of the often confining rhyme and meter, that Alan Parry captures his observed subjects with drama, the neon itself combusting with imagination, each line and word furious with intent, and across poems such as the opening glory of grief/lust/music, Old Friends, Beautiful Boy, She Was, the sublime The Scene, the explosive inferno of In My Wake and the brutality of expression in Wisdom, Alan Parry finds not only a volcano of self-burning erupting in the darkness, but the solace that those Neon Ghosts can bring when viewed as agents of immortality.

A set of poetry filled in drama, of bitterness, of enlightenment, and of the heat of our modern life, Neon Ghosts is a spectacle of commotion being forged by the crisis of our age; and it absolutely priceless.

Ian D. Hall