Overnight in the Guest House of the Mystic

by Dick Allen

Book by Allen, Dick

Genres: Poetry

64 pages, Hardcover

First published July 1, 1984

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

[Wyatt Reu · Rating 3 out of 5]

Was between 3/4 on Dick Allen’s poems here. While sensitive, probing, vulnerable, many of the poems are formally flat. Allen is not an imagist cracking the whip to reveal a flash of revelation, his poems are conversational, meandering. Though he circles around the mystical tirelessly, his poems, ultimately, remain outside of it. The mystical here is more desired than real. The space of the poems is not it’s own, it is stuck in the space of the everyday life of the writer, the self: Dick Allen, not the poet self; the latter of which given voice might actually embody this deeper experience that the writer so earnestly craves.