Present Vanishing: Poems

by Dick Allen

Present Vanishing is a book where East and West meet, where Zen contends with social satire, often on the playing fields of American landscapes. In Dick Allen’s new poems, almost every word is a search for calm in the midst of contemporary chaos. Paradox is the present vanishes, even as it unscrolls before us. Author of six previous poetry collections, Dick Allen has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ingram Merrill Foundation. He is also the recipient of the Robert Frost Prize for Poetry and the Hart Crane Poetry Prize. He recently retired from his position at the University of Bridgeport and lives in Trumbull, Connecticut.

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2008

About the author

Dick Allen is an American poet, literary critic and academic, who is serving a five-year term as poet laureate of the state of Connecticut from July 1, 2010, through June 30, 2015. His book This Shadowy Place received the 2013 The New Criterion Poetry Prize.

Allen has retired from his position as Charles A. Dana Endowed Chair Professor at the University of Bridgeport. He has been co-editor of several anthologies of science fiction and science fiction criticism.

His poems have appeared in 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 New Criterion, Ploughshares, and The Gettysburg Review.

Reviews

[Erik · Rating 4 out of 5]

Classic Allen. Buddhist-influenced verse that verges on the formal without the formality--very, well, buddhist. Allen's "American buddhism" doesn't hit you over the head, instead, it very much mirrors what i think poetry should aim for inherently: attention to small things and honoring the "thingness" of those things. This is not "new-agey" sort of stuff (Allen abhors such sentiment). This is solid poetry from a dedicated practitioner of the art.

[Ace Boggess · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've often encounter Dick Allen's poems in journals or the Best American Poetry. I've read them and loved the. I've often laughed. Somehow, though, I never picked up one of his books before Present Vanishing. It's a wonderful collection, filled with that same sense of peace and amusement that I've found in his work before. I won't waste your time with a long-winded review of this. I'll just say read it. I leaves you feeling good, and that's something we can use right now.

[AC · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first part is clearly the strongest--some of the momentum seems lost in the remaining parts, although there are still some good poems there.