The Day Before: Poems - Hardcover

Allen, Dick

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1889330752 ISBN 13: 9781889330754

Publisher: Sarabande Books, 2003

Synopsis

"A stunning follow-up to Allen’s award-winning New and Selected. Accessible and profound. "No matter how tactile and specific he is, Allen always retains a sense of the greater world. . . . [H]is pristine poems flow like timelines, drawing unexpected connections between happenings both major and minor, and observations both subtle and life changing."—Booklist

Dick Allen has received the Robert Frost Prize for Poetry and The Hart Crane Poetry Prize. His books include Ode to the Cold War, Flight and Pursuit, Overnight in the Guest House of the Mystic, Regions With No Proper Names, and Anon and Various Time Machine Poems. He recently retired from his position as Charles A. Dana Endowed Chair Professor at the University of Bridgeport and lives in Trumbull, Connecticut.

About this title

From the Back Cover

Dick Allen takes what we thought we knew for sure about the world and turns it inside out--the cliches, the rules of thumb, the assumptions we gloss over and take for granted. We see the objects and events of everyday life in renewed, suddenly vivid terms, so that the songs, the kisses, the summers, the promises and lies, and the people--all that we've lost and keep losing--begin to shine anew under Allen's elegiac and celebratory attention. The poems in "The Day Before are, as always in Allen's work, passionate chronicles of contemporary America in transition to the new millennium, marked by the ebullience of high craft and formal virtuosity. But these new poems, a unique hybrid of lyric-narratives, are remarkable for their added, personal gravity, their burnish of hard-won wisdom. And the miracle is how, in the face of our irrevocable losses as nation, species, and individuals, Allen's poems come down on the side of life and joy. "Some years I've/Barely survived; //Others, I climbed around and shouted in, /Doing my best to live a praising life."

About the Author

Author of six previous poetry collections, Dick Allen has received poetry writing fellowships from the NEA, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, as well as the Robert Frost Prize for Poetry and The Hart Crane Poetry Prize. He recently retired from his position as Charles A. Dana Endowed Chair Professor at the University of Bridgeport.

About this edition

• Publisher: Sarabande Books
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 1889330752
• ISBN 13: 9781889330754
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 136