Books by Dick Allen

Dick Allen, one of America's best-known poets, and author of six volumes of poetry, including Ode to the Cold War and his latest from Sarabande, The Day Before, is also a highly respected critic not only of poetry but of other forms of literature. He has also been the co-editor of several anthologies of science fiction and science fiction criticism. He first came to attention as a poet in his 60's epic "Anon and Various Time Machine Poems," a Dantaesque trip through the occasionally hellish landscapes of America. Writing with a distinctly modern diction, Allen fuses narrative and meditative styles in moving and engaging poems.

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 and 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. Allen has also written extensive criticism, not only of poetry, but of other literary genres. He has also co-edited anthologies of science fiction, including Science Fiction the Future (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), and Looking Ahead (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975). Said Publishers Weekly of Dick Allen: "Allen's work ranges with ease from astronomy to politics to domestic situations; his poetry captures great swatches of real and imagined experience in nimble style."

Presents the coming together of the social and political concerns that marked Dick Allen's earliest work, such as the epic Anon, and the lyricism found in his more recent poetry. In this collection, his fourth, Allen continually searches for transcendent patterns from experience rooted in the last years of the 20th century. Meditative, narrative, often religious, and always carefully crafted, the poems in Flight and Pursuit are the fugue of a poet come into his own.

These are poems both of the earth and of what lies beyond it. Dick Allen writes of the dimensions of our world, of things as tangible as our houses and highways, as elusive as our loves and fears. But he also writes of the moments when we see something larger and greater just past the boundaries of our existence -- sometimes glimpsed for a brief instant behind a door, sometimes seen unfolding majestically in the skies above.

Allen's poetry is sometimes erotic, sometimes futuristic, alternately chilling and humorous. Few modern poets have viewed their homeland with such perception and honesty. He detects and brilliantly describes a civilization propelled forward in time and technology and yet drawn back to its roots and traditions.

Regions With No Proper Names is a very rare book, and is offered unopened, with perfect dust jackets -- rare and an equally special book from a major American poet.