This Day Full of Promise: Poems Selected and New

Douglas Barbour is a professor of English at the University of Alberta.
He is the author of Lyric/anti-lyric : Essays on Contemporary Poetry,
Breath Takes, and Fragmenting Body Etc.

Falling squarely in the tradition of straight-talking working-class
poetry, This Day Full of Promise provides a solid introduction to a
relatively unknown poet who has long been a part of the Ottawa scene.
Michael Dennis’s poems are mostly tall tales (even the ones about
Catherine the Great’s sexual appetites) for and from the bars and
streets. They are blustery, often bombastic, full of street slang, and
frequently funny.

Nevertheless, there are moments of powerful empathy here, as well as
some poems of profound sadness and insight. In the powerfully muted
“carefully measured,” the poet (presented in the second person)
observes the ordinary horrors of a “waiting room / of a cancer
clinic” where he is painting the walls and hanging pictures,
“carefully measur[ing] / distances between nails / checking to make
sure / that everything is level.”

One could wish that Dennis’s language play took a few more chances,
occasionally moving beyond the street. Certainly, he can make fun of
himself, as in crowd-pleasing “hockey night in Canada.” In the end,
This Day Full of Promise comes across as a kind of memoir in free verse.