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Early
reviewers of Down by the Riverside Ways, Susan Allison’s
second book, have been enthusiastic. John Basinger writes as follows:
“Some poets produce highly polished and showy zirconium studded
with many well-behaved commas. Susan Allison has created poems that seem
to have become naturally what they are as diamonds emerge from carbon
under pressure, not laid out on black velvet, but set in mother earth.”
In addition to being elemental, this book is seismic in its joys and furies.
The poet is as unrestrained in her pleasures as she is passionate in her
hatred of a host of wars waged against the least among us. She treats
us to the sensual joys of a childhood spent partly near the rivers and
marshlands of the Connecticut shoreline and partly in rural Kentucky,
where she reveled in rambunctious rebellion, then moves us to Middletown,
Connecticut, which becomes a metaphor for Middle America. In this very
real and very mythical place, Allison celebrates new pleasures: “The
good life / comes through your eyes / and your ears and your skin / the
way a wild animal comes at you / when it is just curious.” In town
and also down by “the fish-rank muck, soft and warm and full of
suck” of the river that runs through it, there is erotic and marital
love. And there is also the love of a mother for her cub. Seldom has a
poet sung so sweetly of so many sorts of love. These include her love
of the “sidewalk legends” who inhabit her town, the street
people, the prostitutes, the jump-roping children, the sanely mad, the
old men down on their luck, the activists, the drunks, the visiting troubadors—all
the characters that make this book as rich in local heroes as any Winesburg,
Ohio or Spoon River, Illinois. But despite the Maxfield Parrish light
that illuminates the town at sunset and despite the love the downtrodden
show one another, “there is always pain”—the pain of
a deprivation that drives some to drugs and death, the pain caused by
wars waged against the poor by everyone from landlords to office-holders,
the pain crystalized in characters like an old woman, savior of all the
destitute on her block, who is badgered by the police and yuppified neighbors
when all she wants is to carry groceries to her walk-up digs in a tenement.
Susan Allison reserves some of her strongest words to castigate “the
creeps and the politicians and the buyers / and the sellers and owners
and even some of / the social workers in their brand new jobs.”
The book ends with a volley of furious poems, among which is one of its
most original, “The Cow Is for Us.” The poet refuses to go
gently: she reveals herself as “The ancient shamanic Karma-Mama...dancing
again, / whirling dervishly, / lifting all her skirts... / stirring and
gathering unscrupulous winds / violently streaking the sky / electric
dark.” In the end, however, there is one saving grace that Allison
wishes upon the wagers of war, a grace granted them when they are occasionally
“fortunate enough / to fail and fall, / through grace, contrite.”
 Susan Allison lives in Middletown, Connecticut with her husband, Stephan, and son, John. Born in Derby, Connecticut and raised in Louisville, Kentucky, she calls poetry and wanderlust the two main constants in her life. After mountain-climbing and hitch-hiking through East Africa, she returned to Wesleyan University to earn a BA in African Studies in 1985. Shortly after graduation, she discovered used and rare bookstores, which became new destination points for her wanderlust until she opened her own, Ibis Books & Gallery, in 1989. The bookstore was transformed in 1991 into NEAR, Inc./The Buttonwood Tree, an arts and cultural performance space on Main Street in Middletown, Connecticut.
Click here to read sample poems.
Click here to view Susan Allison's upcoming events Click here to read ancillary material in the Seminar Room
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BOOK
STATISTICS
ISBN: 978-0-9817883-3-3
80 pages, 5.5" x 8.5" perfect bound
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