Songs of Seven Days is comfort food for the soul. The volume itself reprises the gift books popular in the Late Victorian Era when, as John Updike noted in modern time, part of the significance was the artifact itself: the cover is heavy matte dark stock, the classic cover design with a splash of glittery gilded embossed gold, raised to the fingertips. There are elegant prints throughout the volume. The fonts are classical, the paper hefty. It has a splendid, venerable hand-feel. 

The collection is patterned metaphorically, as the title suggests, on the seven days of creation, each section, or day, behind a fine black and white etching of imaginative regard for the ordinary, in beauty, value, and naturalness. But more striking is Dennis’s attainment of Baudelaire’s supra natural aesthetic: the most intense sensation from the songs is the contemplation of how much and how far beyond what meets the eye stirs the soul. 

There is light in these songs, and the refraction is marvelous: the interiority of life in the exteriority of creation—and the reverse—steadily parades before the reader’s eyes and ears. Dennis handles the tactile like a slick, cool river rock, and derives the signification of the qualitative from the quantitative. For example, in “The Uses of Stone,” the poet leads a winding odyssey of substance and purpose in the being and application of stone in historical and contemporary context. But there’s so much more. What is rock, and rocky within us? And the weight we place on that, in hindsight and foresight? What part of us is stone, stony? Seven Days provokes self-reflection against the poetic scrolling imagery ranging from Pharoah’s tomb to David’s small rock that felled gigantic Goliath to the rolled-back stone at the tomb in Jerusalem to Michaelangelo freeing the angel from the marble block with a chisel. 

The casual reader might find Dennis most accessible in more structured verse, like the coquettishly playful quatrains of “La Luna del Deseo.” This is an archetypal sample of the poet’s ability to consistently mine the meaningful from the mundane: 

“… But this evening the moon looks like she wants to bum a cigarette, although she’s trying to quit, 

And doesn’t want to go home 

And have to explain the smell of smoke to anyone.” 

The melancholy late-night surrender to solitude rings veritable as Hemingway’s “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” but with a coy smile of faithful acceptance at the sunset of the verse. 

Another traditionally structured gem is “The Elephants in Tennessee,” a compact third line rhyming tercet: the immense scale of pachyderms, the forlorn inner shyness, reluctance, and withdrawal; the harshness of captivity and soulless spectacle of life fostering a reluctance, a wariness, to trust the world. But yet there is sweet redemption. 

This collection is a modern gift book in both its plangent poetry and plush production values—the interior prints alone are worthy accessions—and the thoughtful, gentle, rueful, playful, joyful and solemn poetics are a balm for anyone wrestling life’s inexorable vicissitudes. Gift Songs of Seven Days as a balm to someone close who’s weathering stormy seas. Buy two, and keep one for yourself: you deserve it, and you’re going to need it. 

To celebrate National Poetry Month, the author is giving away three autographed copies of this poetry collection. Click here to enter the Rafflecopter giveaway through midnight, CDT, April 30, 2024.