'in a reasonably graceful celluloid manner'

In July 2003 the late John O’Connor, an essential figure in the Cantabrian poetry scene in which Julia Allen was prominent, suggested that: 

the work of a number of otherwise diverse and nationally and/or internationally linked poets shared enough of the following characteristics to identify their work as coming from Christchurch: 

1) An emphasis on craft over flamboyance or display — leading perhaps to what we might call a moderated intensity, difficult to define but easy to recognise once encountered. It was poetry written for both voice and eye, intellect and heart, classical in its implicit insistence on the limitations of sense over imagination and vice versa.
2) A recognition of the centrality of the image, and the uses of concision — it could almost at times be termed mediated post-imagism.
3) Independent of the above, an interest in haiku and the influence of this on their other poems, and/or an interest in European literature to the point of marked influence on their work.
4) A concern with the spirituality of locality and more so — relatively explicitly in comparison to other recent “schools” — with spirituality in a broader sense.[1] 

O’Connor’s third point is confirmed by the influence of the French symbolist Stéphane Mallarmé upon Joanna Paul’s Imogen (Hawk Press, 1978) and Julia Allen’s Midas Touch (Nag’s Head Press, 1990). Both texts were undervalued when published yet continue to accrue admirers for a sensuous yet intellectual heft that supports O’Connor’s fourth point about the spiritual. Paul’s afflatus is Catholic, whereas Allen’s blows existential. As a teenager Allen was already reading Camus in the original French. Her ear and awareness of typographic scoring were honed by exposure to Mallarmé. 

Both poets show, to borrow an observation from Ian Wedde, “a sense of order or form that resists foreclosure,”[2] and their discrete pieces plot an expansive narrative where the boundary between inner and outer, self and other, is not obvious despite/because of the precision of the writing. They foreground gender yet neither is a doctrinal feminist. And both poets had to negotiate the death of a child, as did Mallarmé — although they read him years before their stories echoed his — so absence is a continual presence in the small body of their work. Allen asserts that:

For me Fate is an homme fatal. Fate is … I think that sexuality is a part of Fate. Male poets always see Fortune as a strumpet, but Fortune or Fate can never be a strumpet to a woman, because Fate is necessarily other. Fate is an Other you have to come to terms with, whom you have to be engaged with. I see celibates as people who have stopped engaging with Fate. Part of the reason of celibacy is to free you from Fate. Fate is ruthless, which is why it’s something to have a relationship with.

Death is a friend, a companion — not an alter-ego, somebody who should be a mate. Death was never part of my world until it came into my life. Death came breaking through in a way which was almost a kind of rape, in a funny sense — it was totally out of order. Once Death has broken through and become a force, you have to engage with it. You have a relationship with the forces that come in. They can be quite physical. There can be a force of Anger. The poem “Flax,” that was the force of Anger coming through into my life.[3] 

For her poetry is both the stone that is rolled away from the tomb to prove resurrection and the repeated act of rolling in a vain attempt at redemption: