Overview

Bill Allen's new book, The Birth of the Atlantic, has everything I look for in poetry: surprising language, varied preoccupations, a gentleness in the voice, and a companionable presence. He moves through history and time, nature and cities with his mind captivated, finding the unexpected image and phrasing to make the poems lyrical and pleasurable.

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9781969900204

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Reviews

Bill Allen's new book, The Birth of the Atlantic, has everything I look for in poetry: surprising language, varied preoccupations, a gentleness in the voice, and a companionable presence. He moves through history and time, nature and cities with his mind captivated, finding the unexpected image and phrasing to make the poems lyrical and pleasurable. I felt connected to the poems because Bill seems so connected to the world-the world of relationships, whether it's with his beloved partner or mother (in a great final, elegiac poem), or with aspen trees and rivers and eels, or with old friends. His world view is large, but his focus is on the smallest and most important things. I love these rich, startling, intuitive poems. Kevin Boyle, poet, author of A Home for Wayward Girls and Astir. The poems here speak powerfully to all those ways in which landscape is woven into human experience. Place-whether a bed of moss, a sidewalk in Brooklyn, or the Blue Ridge Parkway-figures in to what we know and who we are. Allen knows that the oceans we carry with us can take us to such varied shores, and he charts these travels with precision, lyricism, and above all, abiding tenderness. Akiko Busch, whose essay collections include Nine Ways to Cross a River, How to Disappear, and most recently, From the Millpond to the Sea. Moving from the birth of the Atlantic to the streets of New York, from moss clinging to stone to cicadas screeching in summer trees, William Allen's poems create a living atlas of memory, geology, migration, extinction, survival, and wonder. Driven by fierce intelligence, moral urgency, and a profound kinship with the living world, these poems hold deep time and daily life in the same breath. Both elegy and celebration, The Birth of the Atlantic reminds us that the story of humanity is inseparable from the story of the Earth itself. David Hassler, Bob & Walt Wick Executive Director of the Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University and coeditor of The Nature of Our Times: Poems on America's Lands, Waters, Wildlife, and Other Natural Wonders

Author Information

Bill's work echoes beloved voices from poetry, poets, history and politics and a look at the natural world in an era of climate action, with personal memories and a fervent look into language, love and the ties that bind us to each other. There's humor, humanism, a music of the earth, irreverence, a quest for ethical answers in a world titling off its axis. Poems echo Lowell and Bishop, Pasolini, Philip Levine and Muriel Rukeyser, with their spirits of questioning and grace. Also a visual artist, Bill's work can be seen at www.ekphrases.com.He is the recipient of a 2009 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in Creative Writing and has published five previous books of poems. Bill worked at the United Nations in New York in writing and technology communications for many years after teaching at Cooper Union and the School of Visual Arts, hoping to bring a poetry of humanism and heart to the poetry canon. He's currently working with a conservation advisory group to explore and inventory Hudson Valley local habitats and climate needs.

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