"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 Sneekers On
