David Parker Allen Poetry
Whaling Town, available now in print, audio and ebook.
"In Whaling Town, David Parker Allen walks the reader through moonlit forests, moist streets, brass-filled nights, and the machinations of middle age. His poems are grounded, sublime, mysterious and move with the blunt honesty of a man weighing the tin in his pack. The poems are refreshing. Ambient, Mysterious. Here, the shadow of an elk stands beside the shadow of a man, Melville hovers in the harbor air, Lucille’s trumpet burns away the past, and a single dictionary entry—metempsychosis—opens a doorway into the infinite chambers of what we know as the human heart. Things run so deep we can smell the salt and sea in our blood. With language both tempered and ecstatic, Allen gives us a book steeped in the salt of old ports, the bite of memory, and the unexpected warmth of the now. This is a book of poem to take to the beach and, simultaneously, to leave at home when walking in the sand."
- Matthew Lippman, award-winning American poet and author of We Are All Sleeping With Our Sneakers On
Midwest Book Review - October 2025
"Whaling Town: Poems weaves history and American experience as it explores, via prose poems, the culture and patterns of such diverse locales as the Mississippi Delta, a whaling town that could be Melville, New Bedford, and musical tones of past and present, from the roaring 20s to modern times.
Readers anticipating a treatise on whaling history or New England experience alone will find that much more evolves from these writings. David Parker Allen grapples with subjects ranging from the shame of Selma and ironies of the human condition to what differentiates us from animals:
Beasts have edges. Beasts have gait./Beasts are made for stalking with fangs not made for hate.
The powerful poems draw connections between places, people and situations which prove delightfully unexpected, as in the poem "Daughter":
I need to go for a walk, and paint a self-portrait,/of a rain-soaked fisherman with wrinkled eyes/in a navy-blue oilskin hat,/walking in the door,/dripping in droplets,/about to say,/Daughter, I miss you
As the poems probe daily life scenarios and concerns, they draw together seemingly disparate subjects under the umbrella of an appreciation for life, affection for others, and inspections of history and personal perspective.
The result is a potent blend of human condition, nature and history that outlines not one, but a myriad of stories that take readers on journeys of personal connection.
Its writings are thought-provoking and evocative, inspired by music and featuring interludes of passion and reflection that carry readers into other lives."