Dick Allen's The Day Before
A Frodo's Notebook Book Review
by Daniel Klotz - Redactor in Chief

Deep into an endlessly rewarding book of new poems, Dick Allen remembers several "Lost Friends," one of whom is "Bill/Who nightly loved to drive the country roads/From Round Lake to Elnora,/Turning off the headlights of his father's Ford/So I'd be scared//Enough to write, he said, of life and death/With some intensity."

Charming as the anecdote is, Allen's poetry finds its intensity elsewhere--from a speaker who, in the years when he could muster the strength, "climbed around and shouted in,/Doing my best to live a praising life," as "Lost Friends" goes on to tell us. There is only a single "and" in that clause--Allen does not write "climbed around and shouted in and did my best to live a praising life," and that is important, because in Allen's poetry climbing around and shouting in are how a praising life is lived. And the obsession is with living--truly living, in the richest sense of the word--a "praising life."

Dick Allen's poems read easily, spoken with an honest voice in language that is always personal. He names names, employs question marks, demands answers. That is the voice shouting in. Yet--and here he distinguishes himself from drifters, from bohemians padding away at their bongos, from slam poets who only bitch and moan--he climbs around, even when he would rather stop, would rather settle in, get comfortable: "Something was out there on the lake, just barely/visible in the dark," opens his poem "The Cove," a masterpiece of contemporary American verse. He debates whether he should investigate it further, sighing, "I had just turned fifty/and whatever it was that might be floating there//I didn't want it to be. Too much before/that came unbidden into my life/I'd let take me over. I knelt again and stared again." He can't bring himself to sit still, to live a live devoid of intensity. It isn't that he needs to be scared--he knows that and convinces us, too--it is that he is trying to do his best to live a praising life. And that means shouting in and climbing around.

The poems in The Day Before (Sarabande, $12.95) clamber along after the poet, spanning the spectrum in terms of form, structure, and subject matter (he deals every bit as poetically with politics and science as he does with wild stallions and mountain lakes). Yet in each poem, with its unique vantage points and posture, several things remain constant: a high degree of quality, language that is colloquial and personal, and a fully present voice.

One of Allen's uniquenesses as a poet is his extraordinary ability to write lists. Listing is usually not included with alliteration, rhythm, and metaphor as a poetic device, but this is only by accident, mistake, or negligence--it has been around since Homer employed it in the Odyssey and the Iliad. Allen is more agile with lists than any of his contemporaries: "They always seem in danger of going under:/the tiny laundromat with no one in it,/Tony's Pizza closed, a few blue-haired ladies/in front of the three-aisle Rexall's;/the last gasp of the famous jewelry store/tarred and feathered, driven from downtonwn;/the ubiquitous bank with its tellers who have no last names..." ("Strip Malls"). Or, "Most shapes,/you know what they are:/a rock-garden serpent, a house in the mist, a man's head,/an evening star" ("The Cove"). Yet another: "He was about drainpipes, spyglasses, red Pegasus/on a Mobil sign" ("A Boy Called Vanish").

When Allen tells his daughter, "Here, I leave you," in the book's final poem, "This Far," it is hard to shake the feeling he is addressing us, too. His final list suggests possibility more than closure, or, rather, possibility as closure: "But now/I've said enough, it's yours. And don't forget/I've left you butter in the blue and silver dish/and stubs and stalks of candles you may light."

It is probably impossible to live a truly praising life without evangelizing, trying to get others to do some climbing around and shouting in of their own, and Allen is an evangelist of the best sort. If he believed he could, he would pick up the rhthyms, objects, and wishes of our ordinary (but deeply meaningful) lives, hold them in his hands, toy around and improvise on them, then fashion them into something revelatory and transcendent. But he cannot, and he knows it. Life is far too big for that, too full, too grounded and earthy. We can never, Allen shows us, pick up life as if it were a manageable thing. What we can do is pick up on life the way a jazz musician might pick up on a chord progression, a basic melody, a time signature, fully aware that it is bigger than him, beyond him, and he is merely climbing around on it and shouting in.

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