Dick Allen’s earlier collections have always included poems written in traditional form. But This Shadowy Place is his only book in which every poem is rhymed and metered. Allen’s “stand alone” new poems – narrative, meditative, lyric, sometimes excursionsinto Zen Buddhism – consistently merge traditional form with his hallmark cultural,political and religious themes. Even when seeming to write of himself, Allen is actuallyforever writing of the strange and unique transitions from the American TwentiethCentury to the Twenty-first. Known as one of the best craftsmen and poetry performersin the country, Allen here gives us new poems that when read either silently or aloudconstantly shift between the literal and the metaphorical. The paths in these new poemslead unexpectedly through both calming and foreboding shadows. Dick Allen is the author of seven previous poetry collections, including Present Vanishing,The Day Before, and Ode to the Cold War: Poems New and Selected. He’s received NationalEndowment for the Arts and Ingram Merrill Poetry Writing Fellowships, six inclusions inThe Best American Poetry annual volumes, a Pushcart Prize, among numerous other nationalawards. His poems have appeared regularly in many of America’s leading magazines,including The Atlantic, The Georgia Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Hudson Review, TheNew Criterion, The New Yorker, Poetry, The New Republic, Tricycle, Rattle, and The AmericanScholar. Dick Allen was appointed as the Connecticut State Poet Laureate (2010–2015),succeeding John Hollander. This Shadowy Place is the thirteenth winner of the annual New Criterion PoetryPrize. Previous winners of the prize include Deborah Warren, Adam Kirsch, CharlesTomlinson, Bill Coyle, Geoffrey Brock, J. Allyn Rosser, Daniel Brown, D.H. Tracy, and,prior to Allen, George Green. The New Criterion Poetry Prize was established in 2000and is awarded annually to a book-length manuscript of poems that pays close attentionto form. The series has for many years attracted the attention of both readers and critics,and Booklist has called