Country Music [Paperback]

Allen Hoey (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 176 pages
• Publisher: WordTech Communications (April 1, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1934999059
• ISBN-13: 978-1934999059
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.9 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,588,638 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Allen Hoey has published six collections of poems and three novels; Once Upon a Time at Blanche's is most recent collection of poems. His 2008 collection of poems, Country Music, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prise. His other books include A Fire in the Cold House of Being (selected by Galway Kinnell for the 1985 Camden Poetry Award), What Persists, Provencal Light & Other Poems, and The Precincts of Paradise, all poetry collections, and Chasing the Dragon: A Novel about Jazz, Voices Beyond the Dead, and On the Demon's Trail, a mystery. His poems and reviews have appeared in numerous journals, among them The American Poetry Review, The Georgia Review, The Hudson Review, Poetry, Shenandoah, and The Southern Review. His poem "A Thousand Prostrations" was included in Essential Zen (HarperCollins) and another poem, "Essay on Snow," was included in The Best American Spiritual Writing of 2004 (Houghton Mifflin). In 1993 he accepted the Precepts as a Rinzai Zen Buddhist. He was 2001 Bucks County Poet Laureate and currently serves as Director of the Bucks County Poet Laureate Program. He received a 2002 Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship. He lives in an 18th century stone cottage on an old horse farm with a view of Bowman's Hill.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Country Music stays with you, April 25, 2008

By 

Jared Smith - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Country Music (Paperback)

This is an immensely ambitious and successful attempt to redefine poetry and poetic form in the language of contemporary society. Allen Hoey walks the serrated knife edge between words, perceptions, intuitions, feelings, and glimpses of a transcendental immortality that only a poet of the highest order can have. This big, boisterous, rolling volume of poetry repeatedly crosses and re-crosses the lines between casual conversation, down-home country music, and Zen-like meditations of the ancient Chinese mountain poets. An understanding flows across mankind, driven into and against itself as it struggles with words to find what it cannot understand of eternity and immortality and love but celebrates in the country songs of beat-up trucks and the deeper country song of crickets in the evening grasses. There is a great deal of pain in this book, and a great deal of love...and they both keep coming at you.

In the end, at closing time, where thought leaves off, a man comes home from work to the cold indifference of a woman's back, with beer in his belly, rail whiskey in his mind, and a distant desperately bright but unclear and vacillating vision of god in his brain. The bars close down, and eternity wraps itself in chill wisps among the trees and grasses of Bowman's Hill.

5.0 out of 5 stars The heart of the country...inside and out., April 10, 2008

By 

Glenn Raucher (New York, NY) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Country Music (Paperback)

Whether writing about his beloved country music that provides the title of this book, recounting the perfect, colloquial dialogue of a North Country dive, exploring nature- of the physical world and that within a person--Allen's Hoey's poems perfectly capture the longing of looking back, the terror of looking forward, and the rare satisfaction we can get by just remaining in the moment. As he writes in "After Lunch,"

"...I just watch each
day's sun as it rises and sets and
don't worry about short or long."

There's no sentimentality in his work; as he writes in "Partisan Glimpses," his poems are "Not exactly/maudlin, not quite sentimental..." but often with a pained romanticism, full of hard experience, yet never relinquishing the possibility of joy and delight. Then, like a Prophet too-long ignored there are poems of dread warning: The book begins with lines about death, speaking of the people, animals and things valued by us dying, and how "In the fullness of time, they all do." In "Drinking Alone," it bears down, ending with

"...Beyond this
glass of wine, only darkness,
darkness and cold longing for light."

Allen never rushes toward endings, toward forced over-arching meaning; never goes overboard for a "Grand Statement," and thus often sets us up, imperceptibly, getting us where we are vulnerable, offering no soft landing, no hysteria distracting us from the harsh or joyful reality of what and who we are. And occasionally there's a descent that lodges deep in the heart, like in the poem "Ineluctible Modality of the Visible," a terrible, recurring vision; a nightmare lodged

"somewhere deeply away;
our minds, reaching blindly, maybe in sleep,
pull[ing] them, ceaselessly, tirelessly, back into light."