The Day Before: Poems [Paperback]

Dick Allen (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1, 2003

"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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

...Allen's imagery is deft.... -- Robert Phillips, The Houston Chronicle

...[W]ith amazement...and admiration for Allen's virtuosity the reader becomes aware of the political beneath the personal. -- Cori L. Gabbard, American Book Review

Allen's uncannily chosen imagery, with its teeming multiplicity, constitutes his life thus far—from the mundane to the exceptional.... -- David Yezzi, The Philadelphia Inquirer

Endlessly rewarding... -- Daniel Klotz, Frodo's Notebook

What sets [these poems] apart is their intensity and ingenuity of language and invention.... -- Jeff Gundy, ForeWord Magazine --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From the Back Cover

Dick Allen takes what we thought we knew for sure about the world and turns it inside out—the clichés, 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."

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Product Details

• Paperback: 136 pages
• Publisher: Sarabande Books; 1 edition (April 1, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1889330760
• ISBN-13: 978-1889330761
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.3 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,524,835 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the best collections in a long time, June 15, 2003

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Cortney Davis (Redding, CT United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Day Before: Poems (Paperback)

Dick Allen is a word master, a poet whose work should be required reading by all poets, all Americans, all world citizens, and by anyone interested in life, language, and literature. Not only is this book physically beautiful, but the poems are wonderful. There is kindness, depth, awe, humor, and such a wide-ranging sensibility in Allen's poems that this book, although seeped in the modern (computers and all) will be timeless. Highly recommended.