Missing the Kisses of Eloquence

Bert Almon is a professor of English at the University of Alberta and
the author of Calling Texas and Earth Prime.

Michael Dennis writes poetry in an easy-going style. It is too easygoing
and rarely rises above the banal. The free verse lacks rhythm and
tension; the lines are slack rather than pulsing. The attitudes in the
poems are decent—the poet is on the side of life, opposes violence to
women, and frets about events like the Gulf War—but the poems don’t
show enough craft and imagination to involve the reader very deeply.
Here and there a good metaphor emerges from the humdrum
narratives—codes that permit family violence are said to be “secret
/ as bruised ribs.” The least successful of these poems are the ones
about the speaker’s early sexual experiences, which manage to be
physiological in a way that is deeply embarrassing to read. The poems
struggle to convey the inwardness of sexual passion but offer a mixture
of dry generalizations and mawkishly graphic images that don’t work
together. The result is neither bawdy nor passionate. The poet might
learn from John Donne about the power of metaphor and suggestion.