August 16, 2010
Pulitzer-winner Dennis is our most precise and dogged poet of regret. The wistful and vaguely stricken speaker of this 11th collection casts a wide net, bemoaning not only past misdeeds or aborted possibilities, but what he might not do in the future, or what he might have done had things turned out differently in the past—“...if your daughter/ Is saving half her dollar-a-day allowance/ So as not to be penniless in old age,/ You may want to ask what part you’ve played/ In making the future appear less promising/ Than the past.” These poems draw their power from a kind of white, middle-class guilt over a life not lived to its fullest, though, the poems know, not lived that badly either. Dennis believes not in “love at first sight, but the will/ To be ready to endorse the feeling/ Should it arise.” While he does reach for—and seek to provide—a kind of empathy (“If you were troubled like us, the sleepless,/ You too would try to comfort yourself with numbers,/ Seeking our symptoms of your affliction/ Among the many who appear rested”), there is too little faith in human connection in these free verse lines to truly convince readers that anyone can actually help anyone else. Nonetheless, there is a strange magic in these poems.
September 15, 2010
The poems in Pulitzer Prize-winning Dennis's 11th collection (after Unknown Friends) seem tailor-made for Garrison Keillor's voice: serious, thoughtful, confiding, avuncular. An observational poet, Dennis is the amiable, late-career English prof at the local cafe, quaintly jotting notes on a legal pad among busy laptop and iPod users, speculating on the aspirations of working folks he encounters: a waitress, a roofer, people who want "Something more...than merely doing the old work/ With a better attitude" and who hope for "proof/ They haven't been living by bread alone." In plain language and halting sentences uncomplicated by poetic artifice, irony, or even much imagery, Dennis probes, albeit lightly, the possibilities for personal fulfillment in lives circumscribed by contingency, mortality, and skepticism. VERDICT Prone to delivering homespun wisdom ("Learn to take pleasure from the effort itself") and stating the obvious ("a flow of truthfulness/ In a time of lies is always welcome"), Dennis rarely achieves the level of surprising or unusual insight one might expect of a Pulitzer Prize winner. Accessible, sincere, and easygoing, these poems may attract a wide audience but will disappoint more demanding readers.--Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, NY
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