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The Day Before
by Dick Allen
115 pages
Sarabande Books, 2003TCR Bookstore Price:
$10.36
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It has been six years since the publication of Dick Allen's excellent
and exhaustive collection,
Ode to the Cold War: Poems New and
Selected (Sarabande Books, 1997) and sixteen years since his
last full length book of new poems. Have the years been well spent? The
answer, upon reading Allen's The Day Before, is an
emphatic yes.
Allen is a well-established "Expansive" poet, who has worked primarily
in narrative and traditional forms. Lately he has moved deeper into the
poetic style he began developing in the New section of
Ode to the Cold War. He has termed it Randomism, in which a lyric
narrative of association is woven around a small incident. In "Poem for
My Sixtieth Birthday," Allen describes this process:
I like to find textures such as I might run my hands across,
a hidden cavern, a little joke
hanging by its tail in a shadowy cave,
some meadows, a crocodile, the footprints
of an old philosopher pursued by elves,
for it's the ramble I love, the nonsensical road
leading to the sensible one
The Day Before is divided into four sections of varied
theme and style. While the first and last sections contain poems of a
more personal (though never confessional) nature, the constant, both
inside and across sections, is mood rather than topic, which makes for a
series of delightful surprises as one proceeds through the book. A T'ang-inspired
poem, "Poem for Li, In Her White Bridal Dress," for example, precedes
the loose and funny "Texas Prison Town":
The only French he ever learned was a la mode
and went his whole life thinking it meant ice cream.
"Quiet, Quiet Now" is a list poem of similes that range from moments in
time, to geography and the fine arts, culminating in one of the
longstanding themes of Allen's work�love as haven:
as how a memory of calm
is like a tall and graceful woman in a summer gown
standing on the porch, holding the screen door open.
A number of the poems are either dedicated to Allen's wife ("Urban
Pastoral") or written to her ("If You Get There Before I Do"), and the
tenderness of their longstanding devotion is one of the pleasures of
reading The Day Before.
The quality of Allen's formal verse is less even. "Letter from the Desk
of Wallace Stevens" swings quickly into a rapturous sing-song which
falls flat with:
Post it to Hartford where
I shall be waiting to
Sweeten the world with my
Blackberry mind.
He has more success with "Animus," which begins "We plan our days,
but our days have other plans," expanding on a favorite Allen theme: the
struggle to live in the moment. Here, his masterful use of
rhyme—"caterwaul" and "nightfall," "imbeciles" and "coffee spills"�and
beneficent world-weariness are beautifully matched.
As in
Ode to the Cold War, the title poem of The Day Before
is the book's emotional fulcrum. A long poem that seems to expand and
contract as Allen moves from the personal to the cultural and back
again, "The Day Before Yesterday" is reminiscent of one of Borges' best
short stories, "El Aleph":
Save the farmers. Save the unions. Save the feel
of a bellrope lifting you a half-inch from the floor
and the mattering details, individual as each
moment is to any one of us, no matter what we share.
Dick Allen draws the reader into his world using images that lead to
reverie, then reminds us why he took us there: to reacquaint us with the
richness and joy of American life.
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Leslie McGrath lives in the village
of Noank, Connecticut. Her poems have appeared in The
Formalist and The Connecticut Review,
and she has been nominated for a 2003 Purhcart Prize.
She is a regular personal commentator on WFCR, an NPR
affiliate, and is an M.F.A. candidate in poetry at
the Bennington Writing Seminars.