Unknown Title

Title:

Practical gods / Carl Dennis.

Author:

Dennis, Carl.

ISBN:

9780141002309

Personal Author:

Dennis, Carl.

Publication Information:

New York : Penguin Poets, 2001.

Physical Description:

xi, 77 pages ; 23 cm.

Content Type:

text

Media Type (RDA):

unmediated

Carrier Type:

volume

Series:

Penguin poets

Penguin poets.

Contents:

Priest of Hermes -- Saint Francis and the nun -- Department store -- Not the idle -- Gelati -- To a pagan -- History -- School days -- Glory -- Prophet -- Delphi -- Infidels -- Pride -- On the bus to Utica -- Jesus freaks -- Serpent to Adam -- View of Delft -- Chance for the soul -- Halfway -- Audience -- Letter from Mary in the Tyrol -- Numbers -- Fallen -- Eurydice -- Lace maker -- After eden -- Progress -- Progressive health -- Just deserts -- More art -- Basho -- Improbable story -- Bishop Berkeley Sunrise -- Eternal Poetry -- In the short term -- Guardian angel -- May jen -- Eternal life -- God who loves you.

Abstract:

Practical Gods is the eighth collection by Carl Dennis, a critically acclaimed poet and recent winner of one of the most prestigious poetry awards, the Ruth Lilly Prize. Carl Dennis has won acclaim for "wise, original, and often deeply moving" poems that "ease the reader out of accustomed modes of seeing and perceiving" (The New York Times). Many of the poems in this new book involve an attempt to enter into dialogue with pagan and biblical perspectives, to throw light on ordinary experience through metaphor borrowed from religious myth and to translate religious myth into secular terms. While making no claims to put us in touch with some ultimate reality, these clear, precise, sensitive poems help us to pay homage to the everyday household gods that are easy to ignore, the gods that sustain life and make it rewarding.

Subject Term:

American poetry -- 21st century.

Poetry.

Genre:

Poetry.

Format:

Books

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Summary

Winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

Practical Gods is the eighth collection by Carl Dennis, a critically acclaimed poet and recent winner of one of the most prestigious poetry awards, the Ruth Lilly Prize. Carl Dennis has won acclaim for "wise, original, and often deeply moving" poems that "ease the reader out of accustomed modes of seeing and perceiving" (The New York Times) . Many of the poems in this new book involve an attempt to enter into dialogue with pagan and biblical perspectives, to throw light on ordinary experience through metaphor borrowed from religious myth and to translate religious myth into secular terms. While making no claims to put us in touch with some ultimate reality, these clear, precise, sensitive poems help us to pay homage to the everyday household gods that are easy to ignore, the gods that sustain life and make it rewarding.

Author Notes

Carl Dennis is the author of nine books of poetry, including Practical Gods , winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, in 2000 he was awarded the Ruth Lilly Prize from Poetry Magazine and the Modern Poetry Association for his contribution to American poetry. He teaches in the English Department at the State University of New York at Buffalo, and is a sometime member of the faculty of the MFA program in creative writing at Warren Wilson College.

Reviews (2)

Publisher's Weekly Review

Dennis's (Ranking the Wishes) eighth book of poems continues his longstanding meditative project: long, elaborate free-verse sentences amble down odd paths of thoughts, past forested landscapes, furniture, paintings and solitary men, to end up with NPR-like reflections on human life. "Today I seem to be focusing on my wish to sand/ And stain and varnish my bookcase, a job that a monk/ Who specializes in repetition might embrace as a ritual," one poem muses; another offers "the comfort of familiar shadows/ But not the glory of leading those shadows/ Out of the flickering dark into the living present." Dennis's warm, accessible approach has garnered him several awards (most recently a big prize from Poetry magazine); it should please devotees of Stephen Dunn, or even of Raymond Carver, whose regretful musings suffuse the volume-closing "The God Who Loves You." Praising "the light touch of [Vermeer's] brush on canvas," or saying, "there's nothing wrong with imagining missions," Dennis can end up saccharine or predictable. At his best, though, Dennis can be far stranger, and funnier, than that; his attractive webs of phrases and sentences can take on a zigzag aspect almost akin to Ashbery. And his best poems make space not just for wise speculations but for genuine oddities, from Utica, N.Y., to "a senior coach like Mr. Ruggieri," to homely, handy extended metaphors: "The past we need is only a kind of currency/ Stamped in red with the date of this day." (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Booklist Review

The title of Dennis' lucid, canny, and warmly funny eighth collection is a bit of an oxymoron and a gauntlet gently thrown down with equal measures of self-mockery and panache. What Dennis wants to know is, Why aren't the gods more responsive, more helpful, more accountable? Plainspoken and resonant, his poems hopscotch from the divine to the ordinary as they challenge pagan gods and the biblical God. Dennis muses on oracles and gods who demand sacrifices and ponders the glory that can be found in everyday chores. Saint Francis thinks about how much easier it is to pray with birds than answer the tough questions of a dying nun, and a man considers the commandment against coveting in "Department Store," a poem both wry and poignant. Dennis also writes piquantly about how we play god by writing fiction, failing to care for an absent neighbor's garden, and donating organs. Dennis' bright poems, as deft as Billy Collins', offer the comfort which the "cold, companionless cosmos / That never comes through when you need a friend" does not. Donna Seaman