Callings

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. (Oct.)