John Allman

In Loew’s Triboro, John Allman’s fourth collection of poems with New Directions, the poet recalls the movie palace in Astoria, Queens, and its centrality to the lives and fantasies of the people in the neighborhood, himself among them. In a combination of prose poems and free verse, sometimes darkly funny, Allman juxtaposes vignettes from the streets of New York with the movies of the period, revisioning such film noir classics as _The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, _and The Asphalt Jungle. “The movie theater in this book,” says Allman, “is the place of darkness where lives are expanded and our culture defines itself through its most common denominators. The projections on the screen are scripts of fate, people caught up by love or violence, as real lives slip in among the film lives—and vice versa.”

The eight short stories in John Allman’s Descending Fire comprise a loose chronicle in the lives of working-class and immigrant New Yorkers, from the 1950s to the present. The author describes his characters as people who, though they earn little money, are not quite working poor—nor can they work without working hard. They do not know quite how to betray or abandon each other. Mostly, they try to love and do not readily shy from duty. Though Allman’s narratives run from stark naturalism to the near magical and the out-and-out futuristic, his imagination holds to the everyday—as if to say to his readers: Yes, life is grim, but it is precisely the unbearable that becomes the ground for healing.

In Curve Away from Stillness, John Allman affirms the connections between poetry and science. They are, he says, as “old as the ones between poetry and cosmology, beauty and knowledge, pleasure and speculation.” In reading this collection of “Science Poems,” we are reminded of a philosophical tradition in literature that, with Lucretius, sees in the power of love the binding force of the universe. Allman’s poems, however-meditations on “Physics,” “Chemistry,” “Biology,” essential “Principles,” the “Planets”––are grounded in the science of our time, in all its elegance and awesomeness.

Scenarios for a Mixed Landscape, John Allman’s third collection of poems, is a book as remarkable for its lyricism as it is for its capaciousness, for there seems to be no area of thought, no branch of learning, no dark region of the mind into which the poet is unwilling to delve. His recent _Clio’s Children: Dostoevsky at Semyonov Square and Other Poems _is a reminder, as the title implies, that history is a narrative art. In his newest book, Allman reflects on art and nature, love and death—the dualities that animate our common humanity. The poems in _Scenarios for a Mixed Landscape _look back, at one level, to the mutable, mythic cosmos of Ovid as well as Lucretius’ universe of benign random change. But to these ancient considerations Allman brings the insights, indeed the language of modern science and evolution, creating a speculative aesthetic appropriate to the awesome possibilities of the atomic age.

“I would say,” Allman observes, “that _Scenarios for a Mixed Landscape _is about nature; that the poems speak in the complementary idioms of art and science in an attempt to comprehend nature; that love recapitulates all life forms; and that love, finally, is only the ground we stand on, the only steadiness beneath us, earned by us, yet strangely given, as we sing of glory and grief.”

John Allman’s Clio’s Children is a book of twenty-three narrative poems that, taken together, form a compelling history of modern times, seen through the eyes of exceptional people at key moments of their lives––moments of “historical epiphany” that serve to define an era. Fyodor Dostoevsky, in 1849, standing helpless and hopeless before the firing squad of Tzar Nicholas I; J. Robert Oppenheimer at Alamogordo, New Mexico, in 1945, about to witness the first nuclear explosion––these two turning points in personal consciousness are chosen by the poet to mark the century that preceded, and prefigured, our troubled postindustrial world. In all the poems, Allman’s dramatic settings point to the tension between the strength of the individual and the ever-encroaching power of the state. The personae he uses––from Dostoevsky to Oppenheimer, Frederick Douglass to Marcus Garvey, George Sand to Emma Goldman, to name just a few––are men and women of amazing gifts, whose greatness challenges our obsessions with the small and trivial, and whose human character is the reality of our history made flesh. These are the children of Clio, the muse of history, goddess of renown.