Country Music, Poems by Allen Hoey
In Allen Hoey’s Country Music, the poet explores the music of country and the country of music; Hoey’s deft narratives and spare lyrics weave a subtle and engaging song.
“This is an immensely ambitious and successful attempt to redefine poetry and poetic form in the language of contemporary society. Allen Hoey walks the serrated knife edge between words, perceptions, intuitions, feelings, and glimpses of a transcendental immortality that only a poet of the highest order can have. This big, boisterous, rolling volume of poetry repeatedly crosses and re-crosses the lines between casual conversation, down-home country music, and Zen-like meditations of the ancient Chinese mountain poets. An understanding flows across mankind, driven into and against itself as it struggles with words to find what it cannot understand of eternity and immortality and love but celebrates in the country songs of beat-up trucks and the deeper country song of crickets in the evening grasses. There is a great deal of pain in this book, and a great deal of love…and they both keep coming at you. In the end, at closing time, where thought leaves off, a man comes home from work to the cold indifference of a woman’s back, with beer in his belly, rail whiskey in his mind, and a distant desperately bright but unclear and vacillating vision of god in his brain. The bars close down, and eternity wraps itself in chill wisps among the trees and grasses of Bowman’s Hill.”—Jared Smith, The Graves Grow Bigger Between Generations and Where Images Become Imbued with Time
“Allen Hoey is a master guide and storyteller; and with the painterly vision of the traditional Chinese poets and an actor-musician’s ear, he introduces us to a world of dogs and fish and Beefalo, where twigs and branches make a racket against the glass and clapboard of the houses, where barns stay ‘warm and fecund,’ and where love flows like ‘unending kegs of Guinness’ while ‘the leaves on Bowman’s Hill flare their moment’s glory.’ Hoey’s world is as full of love and song as it is of heartbreak, but nothing of beauty goes unnoticed, and there’s always the offer of a stiff drink and a good laugh to ease life’s pains. Belly up to the bar next to Ed and Everett, Donny or John, then order a shot & a beer, and listen up: have they got a story for you.”—Meg Kearney, An Unkindness of Ravens
“Whether writing about his beloved country music, recounting the perfect, colloquial dialogue of a North Country dive, exploring nature—physical and psychological—Allen Hoey’s poems capture the longing of looking back, the terror of looking forward, and the rare satisfaction we can get by just remaining in the moment. There’s no sentimentality in his work, but often a pained romanticism, full of hard experience, yet never relinquishing the possibility of joy and delight. The book begins with lines about death, speaking of the people, animals and things valued by us dying, and how ‘[i]n the fullness of time, they all do.’ Allen’s poems never rush toward endings, or go overboard for a ‘Grand Statement,’ and thus often get us where we are vulnerable; no soft landing, no hysteria distracting us from the harsh or joyful reality of what and who we are.”—Glenn Raucher, Director, Writer’s Voice Visiting Author Series, West Side YMCA
“‘Recomposing’—Allen Hoey’s apt word for birds flying up and then settling back—serves as leitmotif for this rich volume, where the world’s a perpetual improvisation, where ‘the ten thousand / things sway to the sound of fiddles and mandolins,’ where ‘poised in tumult,’ the mind catches threads of that transcendental melody and ‘float[s] across / the changes.’ Whether he’s imagining the ‘Cowpunk’ singer who filters his country ’n western through Zen, or eavesdropping on the bar-talk—half scatology, half philosophy—of middle-aged farmers, or tracking the ways one’s own youth ripens and wizens and sours and sweetens into one’s maturity, Hoey pulls us into the music of speech, the music of thought, the music of sleet against a slate roof, the jazzy music of the spheres.”—Nathalie Anderson, Following Fred Astaire and Crawlers
Allen Hoey’s first collection, A Fire in the Cold House of Being, was chosen by Galway Kinnell for the 1985 Camden Poetry Award; subsequent volumes of poetry include What Persists, Provençal Light, and The Precincts of Paradise. His first novel, Chasing the Dragon, was published in 2006, followed the next year by Voices Beyond the Dead. In 1993 he received the precepts as a Rinzai Zen Buddhist. He currently teaches at Bucks County Community College and makes his home with his wife and dogs outside New Hope, Pennsylvania. He also serves as Director of the Bucks County Poet Laureate Program, the oldest such program in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and was a recipient of a Pennsylvania Council for the Arts fellowship in 2002. For more information, please visit www.allenhoey.com.
ISBN 978-1934999059, 176 pages, $20.00