Allen West
Allen West was born in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1930 and came to the U.S. with his family after the 1941 invasion of Greece by Germany. Educated at Philips Academy and Princeton University, he served three years in the U.S. Army and received a PhD in chemistry from Cornell University in 1960. He taught at Williams College and Lawrence University until 1994, when he and his wife moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts. While there, he was a tutor at Cambridge Rindge & Latin High School and a volunteer at Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic. His wife died in 1999; he has three children and three grandchildren.
He began writing poetry in 1983. A runner-up for the 1992 Grolier Poetry Prize and winner of the White Eagle Coffee Store Press’s 2000 chapbook competition (“The Time of Ripe Figs,” 2002), his poems have appeared in many journals including Passager, the Comstock Review, Concrete Wolf, RHINO, and Salamander. A long-time member of The Workshop for Publishing Poets in Brookline, Massachusetts, he credits his continued development to its director, Barbara Helfgott Hyett. Since 2007 he has lived in Lexington Massachusetts.
“Rarely have I read a book that moves so gracefully through the topography of a lifetime.””
“ ‘Who have I been?’ he asks… ‘I am not what I was.’ Although the poems are self-reflective, West does not come to any easy conclusions…””
Beirut Again
Poems by Allen West
Allen West’s new book of poetry, begins with his childhood in Beirut where he was born in 1930. The poems follow the trajectory of his return to the U.S. and his life through marriage, the death of his father and his wife, the return to Beirut in the 21st century. West’s roots in the Middle East are deep: his father was born in Beirut, his grandmother in Damascus.
Winner of 2011
OFF THE GRID poetry PRIZE
