The Day Before

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."