Praise for Beirut Again
“…personal lyrics, exploring the events and circumstances of one man’s life, and at the same time untethered from the personal by their attention to history and geography The poems range over three wars and several continents as West learns to write his name, ‘Platonic, by itself,’ and then witness that self in its various incarnations. ‘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…”
“ …a stunning achievement and epic in its sweep—from childhood in Beirut to first loves to loss to the singing resilience that loss can bring. The language is musical and evocative: ‘a broom’s used beauty,’ ‘Kleenex crumpled up both sleeves / of her kimono crawling with blue dragons.’… Rarely have I read a book that moves so gracefully through the topography of a lifetime.”
About the Author
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.
