Dick Allen's earlier collections have always included poems written in traditional form.
But" This Shadowy Place" is his only book in which every poem is rhymed and metered.
Allen's "stand alone" new poems - narrative, meditative, lyric, sometimes excursions
into Zen Buddhism - consistently merge traditional form with his hallmark cultural,
political and religious themes. Even when seeming to write of himself, Allen is actually
forever writing of the strange and unique transitions from the American Twentieth
Century to the Twenty-first. Known as one of the best craftsmen and poetry performers
in the country, Allen here gives us new poems that when read either silently or aloud
constantly shift between the literal and the metaphorical. The paths in these new poems
lead unexpectedly through both calming and foreboding shadows.
Dick Allen is the author of seven previous poetry collections, including Present Vanishing,
The Day Before, and Ode to the Cold War: Poems New and Selected. He's received National
Endowment for the Arts and Ingram Merrill Poetry Writing Fellowships, six inclusions in
The Best American Poetry annual volumes, a Pushcart Prize, among numerous other national
awards. His poems have appeared regularly in many of America's leading magazines,
including "The Atlantic, The Georgia Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Hudson Review, The
New Criterion, The New Yorker, Poetry, The New Republic, Tricycle, Rattle," and "The American
Scholar." Dick Allen was appointed as the Connecticut State Poet Laureate (2010-2015),
succeeding John Hollander.
"This Shadowy Place" is the thirteenth winner of the annual New Criterion Poetry
Prize. Previous winners of the prize include Deborah Warren, Adam Kirsch, Charles
Tomlinson, Bill Coyle, Geoffrey Brock, J. Allyn Rosser, Daniel Brown, D.H. Tracy, and,
prior to Allen, George Green. The New Criterion Poetry Prize was established in 2000
and is awarded annually to a book-length manuscript of poems that pays close attention
to form. The series has for many years attracted the attention of both readers and critics,
and Booklist has called