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"What sets [these poems] apart is their intensity and ingenuity of language. . . . Formally assured, complex, lucid, refusing both easy simplifications and glib mystifications, these are poems of striking, hard-won maturity." —Foreword
"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
Let’s say you had to choose a time-capsule book of poetry, one that allowed the future to feel what it was like to be a acutely alive in our time—or, as Zen Buddhists would put it, to experience mindfulness. Present Vanishing would serve that purpose, superbly, and it would drive forward the rich pleasures of our poetry as well. In his brilliantly image-drenched latest collection, Dick Allen listens to paintings of Kandinsky, “the yellow trumpets, / the double bass of the blue”; he sees the mist forming above the cracked ice in the drinker’s glass, and imagines for us the texture, the taste of humble pie: “Lungs and blood vessels, / offal and spice”; yet he does not slight the olfactory, either: “the smells of raspberry Jell-O, skunk cabbage, burning tire rubber.” Later, in the same poem, he compares paddling a canoe to the practice of his art: “It seemed like writing a line of poetry: / pull, twist the wrist, feather, dip, and pull again.” The echo of centuries of English prosody is everywhere apparent—Allen has long been known as a formal master. But these amazing new poems—each able to stand alone but also merging into Present Vanishing’s total consciousness—are very much of this time, this place. Present Vanishing is a book where East and West meet, where Zen contends with social satire, often on the playing fields of American landscapes. In Dick Allen’s new narrative, meditation and lyric poems, almost every work is a search for calm in the midst of contemporary chaos. Paradox is everywhere: the present vanishes, even as it is unscrolls before us.
Dick Allen has received poetry writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, as well as the Robert Frost Prize for Poetry and The Hart Crane Poetry Prize. His books include The Day Before: New Poems (Sarabande Books, 2003), Ode to the Cold War: Poems New and Selected (Sarabande, 1997), Flight and Pursuit, Overnight in the Guest House of the Mystic (Louisiana State University Press), Regions With No Proper Names (St. Martin's Press), and Anon and Various Time Machine Poems (Dell). His poems have been selected for The Best American Poetry volumes of 1991, 1994, 1998, and 1999. They appear in many of America's leading journals, including Poetry, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Hudson Review, The Sewanee Review, The Massachusetts Review, The American Poetry Review, The Yale Review, The Kenyon Review, Boulevard, The Gettysburg Review, among others. He recently retired from his position as Charles A. Dana Endowed Chair Professor at the University of Bridgeport.
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