"How Folklore Starts"
from Allan Peterson's
All the Lavish in Common

Allan Peterson:

Allan Peterson recently retired as chair of the Art Department at Pensacola Junior College's Switzer Center for Visual Art in Florida. His first book, Anonymous Or, won the 2001 Defined Providence Press competition, He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the State of Florida.

About All the Lavish in Common:

The Juniper Prize for Poetry

These poems remind us that we are all in the thick of things, the rich and complicated givens. Moving fluently from subjects as diverse as the surface of Europa to a tiny spider in a tear of wallpaper, from Pythagoras at Tyre to the wings of a dragonfly, they are in love with the world and the deep seriousness of living. Often lavish themselves, they reflect the fact that the author is a visual artist as well as a poet of insightful and sustained imagination.

"In All the Lavish in Common, Allan Peterson journeys into language and culture and deep into the hidden places within us, and he speaks from there. As he says in one poem, 'The real details are the unexpected / taking on new life.' With a combination of wisdom and humor, Peterson speaks 'tangibly / about the intangibles,' He gives us reason to be thankful these poems exist."
— Andrea Hollander Budy

"Say your dog could suddenly understand you. Why do men look at women the way they do? it'd ask. Why have y'all messed up the environment? And no heaven for dogs — now why's that? In Allan Peterson's beautiful new book, there's a poem on this subject but also many others: guilt, foolishness, death, hope, even our inability, after all these years, to predict the weather. In the dog poem, the good creature listens patiently but really just wants her master to throw the ball so she can bring it back to him. Patience and compassion are the hallmarks of Allan Peterson's poems; to read them is to be a better human being."
— David Kirby

"Each of Allan Peterson's poems is like a journey through the here and now; we have the feeling of moving even though we're not, and we always arrive somewhere new. Alert to the life that lies in the wren's whistle, no poem tells us where it will end up until it ends. Every object we encounter is a warehouse of the perceptual, with the invisible laboring right behind, and everything arrives full-sized. How likely the impossible is in these poems, and how beautiful. They will sing your bones alive."
— Reginald Shepherd

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