A Review of Alan Parry's TWENTY SEVEN (The Broken Spine) by Vikki C.
Alan Parry’s Twenty Seven (The Broken Spine) is an arresting exploration into the human experience, reimagined through the introspective lens of late American rock star and poet Jim Morrison, renowned for his role as frontman of rock group “The Doors”. A tribute and response to the 80th anniversary of Morrison’s birth, Parry’s third collection channels the idol’s rebellious spirit across landscapes physical and spiritual, culminating in a lucid world poised at the mercy of both excess and profound human desolation.
The book’s twenty-seven short, imagistic poems cast a surreal “Californian desert glow” over the arterial routes of rupture, desire and isolation paired with a distinctly subversive and philosophical tone reminiscent of Morrison’s own writing and that of his influences such as French symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud and Beat poets Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
Like protest songs and intoxicating ballads written “on the road”, there is a lyricism to these poems that navigate border towns and “decades wandering sanguine highways/ honouring pillars of curiosity” (“Border Towns”). Such images of sprawling, shadowed freeways evoke scenes of Morrison’s 1969 experimental film HWY: An American Pastoral – namely its “freedom roads” connecting what he envisioned as the wastelands and social barrenness of 1960s America. A theme which fascinated the rock star and poet throughout his brief life.
These motifs are captured by Parry, whose series of vignettes trace a poignant timescale expressed through raw emotion and disorder – a stark contrast from the initial vibrance and fantasy of youth portrayed in the opening poem “As Children”. Unlike its later counterparts, this poem builds emphatically through the repeated use of past tense, creating a marked sense of distance and juxtaposition between the start of the journey and the rest of the book’s arc:
we learned to fish below the kissing bridge
we threw rocks that tore holes in the sun
we were a thousand photographs
(...)
we swept dust into the corners of the sky
(...)
we were bodies that took shape in the light (1).
This light is however abruptly stolen by the second poem “Lost Innocence” where “children fall on a body/skin swollen / arms twisted /half-naked”. This unsettling allusion to childhood trauma sets a jarring tone of rupture from the outset. We come to a startling juncture between lost youth and manhood with the poem “My Mother”, where the speaker describes his mother’s character and appetite for escapism – an uncanny precursor to his own imminent spiral into a wilderness beyond his control:
my mother
would say there is nothing so loud as silence
my mother
would drink Texas margaritas
she always dressed for a getaway (3).
From hereon, decline and a derangement of the senses take over as portrayed in “I Worry” where the speaker confesses his fears about “smoke-stained walls of loneliness/about fatal summers and last days”. As a reader, we inherit these dystopian-like anxieties which Parry also quells through a dream-like consciousness depicted in “I Dream”, where beauty, humility and alluring burlesques blend to offer a meditative means of necessary escape:
I Dream
of admiring lemon-scaled fish beneath
beneath broken glass waves
of laying down my life for my brother
(...)
of temptations hewn from oak
of being mistaken for a priest (7).
Throughout the book, these visions ebb and blur into complex mappings of roads laced with mirage and delusion, ushering the metaphysical and the temporal into a cinematic film of human crisis, hedonism and ghostly bedlams. We ride along with the odds, witnessing a nihilist vision of vice and temptation. “I see drunks tumbling like dice / see the disguise of family” (“Human Film”).
The narrative is both haunting and prophetic, infused with cameos of sensuality and indulgence set against “the cool of rock water under smoking driftwood skies” (“Sundown”). This rousing blend of dark, confessional voices and evocative dreamscapes pulls us deeper into an awareness of both Morrison’s life as well as our own profound struggles. A life that cannot be measured in straight days, rather the pell-mell of a slow-motion picture set to the tantalising score of the zeitgeist.
With these arching riffs, comes a penchant for libertine pleasure and a nod to lovers who “fast with fever/ shake the walls & feel violin bows skimming against their paper skin” (“Lovers”). Such raw, vulnerability of love also acknowledges that “death and darkness reel” – suggesting how even intimacy barely assuaged the complex emotional vacuum behind life’s euphoric facade.
This despair further compounds in “Girl on the 49 Bus” which depicts the speaker’s ultimate loss of control – now in the capacity of a father. The poem describes a scene of a female passenger who becomes the subject of unwanted male attention on a bus ride: “i see men stare / at your apple-white thighs/ (...) / & i fear for my daughter”. Such emotional turmoil leads the speaker into a vicious cycle of escapism through vice and ultimately relapse: “I was smoking again – weak with rum / watching them roll cigars on their thighs / tempted me” (“Relapse”). The two aforementioned poems which are placed close together in the sequence, effectively synergise to illustrate the imperfection of Man through his faltering role as both “father and son”.
It is this spiritual conflict throughout the book that conjures a visceral world where every encounter en route triggers a response to our own subconscious. Likewise, the poems project our contemporary lives onto the literary forbearers of counterculture, re-opening the doors to an innately familiar tapestry. One that, despite the passage of time, remains rooted in despondency and the constant search for meaning. It is this connection across the ages that stirs a dualism between reader and subject. In this vein, Twenty Seven is impressively curated with cameos that run parallel with the modern roads we take towards love, loss and spirituality.
The book’s closing sequence of poems leaves us with a certain sobriety whilst summoning our spirits to a distinct “otherness”. A place beyond “the kiss of friends/ the calm of gardens/ the whisper of crossroads” in “Sundown” or the luminosity of moonlight in the penultimate poem “After Moonlight Drive”. Far from this – Parry’s finale directs us to a more epic and undefined realm evidenced in the closing poem “Aurora” whose lines “Colour & chaos; / ineffable grace / protracted across time” speak to ruminations of a grander existential journey across “Cleopatra skies”.
This ethereal endnote resonates with a sense of rapture and embodiment – an ultimate calling to reconcile our own obstinance with the occult. In conclusion, Twenty Seven is a masterful collection that forges a unique, artistic path across the decades, paying homage to Morrison whilst blending the fervour, liberation and individualism of ‘60s Beat culture with our modern social constructs. It is, in itself, a journey – one that honours the audacity of personal revolution through doors connecting this world with the unknown.
Twenty Seven may be purchased here
Alan Parry is a poet, playwright, copywriter and the Editor-in-Chief of The Broken Spine. He is the author of three chapbooks: Neon Ghosts, Echoes and Twenty Seven . His debut novella Peeling Apples is forthcoming with DarkWinter Press in 2025.