The day before : new poems / Dick Allen.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Allen, Dick, 1939-2017.

Language:

English

Genre:

Fiction.

Physical Description:

xv, 115 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Louisville, Ky. : Sarabande Books, [2003]

Summary:

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."

Contents:

Vehicle

A boy called Vanish

Homefront

Triptych

The father suite

Bishop eyes

God gives to every bird

After reading Tichborne's elegy

The familiar

Some man I knew

Ballade of the protester

Two friends meet in the Slate Mountains

The pardon of Richard Milhouse Nixon

Letter from one who may be dead or not

Urban pastoral

Below Hoover Dam

Animus

Sunday

[Say we have to name the world again]

If you get there before I do

Then

Intuition

In Wyeth country

Rime forest

Ferns

Strip malls

Quiet, quiet now

The simile

The green children

Cassandra in Connecticut

April

The selfishness of the poetry reader

The devotion of Thomas Merton

Memo from the desk of Wallace Stevens

The children

The rug pulled out from under you

The cove

Lost friends

The day before yesterday

In the gunfight with myself

The dusk traveller

Being taught

Jubilante

Letter to Ye Feng, his student now in Iowa

Poem for Li, in her white bridal dress

Although the temporal is beautiful

Poem for my 60th birthday

The litany of disparagement

This far.

Notes:

Errata slip inserted.

ISBN:

1889330752

1889330760

OCLC:

49824689