Dennis writes often of quotidian, middle-class life, but beneath the modest, reasonably lighted surfaces of the poems lie unexpected possibilities that create contrast and vibrancy. An example from his 1984 collection
The Near World is the poem, "The Man on My Porch Makes Me an Offer," which begins:
- "Above all houses in our town
- I've always loved this blue one you own
- With its round turret and big bay window.
- Do you dream about it the way I do?
- Wouldn't you be just as happy
- On a street with more trees
- In a larger house, whose columned porch
- Impresses every passer-by?
- Does it seem fair that you've won the right
- To gaze from these windows your whole life
- Merely because you saw them first,
- And consign me to a life of envy?"
William Slaughter has given a close reading of this poem in an essay comparing poems by William Stafford, Carl Dennis, and Louis Simpson . The form of Dennis' poem - a plainspoken, dramatic monologue - is fairly characteristic of his poetry. In the poem "Progressive Health" (from
Practical Gods), Dennis uses a similar approach for a proposition that is a bioethicist's nightmare.
In some of his more recent poems, Dennis invokes guardian angels and other domestic deities to animate his poetry. In his 2004 review, David Orr wrote that,
"In 'The God Who Loves You,' his strongest poem in this vein, Dennis avoids bathos by deftly changing the focus from our own anguish at missed opportunities to the grief of the god who loves us. As the poet reminds us:
- The difference between what is
- And what could have been will remain alive for him
- Even after you cease existing, after you catch a chill
- Running out in the snow for the morning paper
- Losing eleven years that the god who loves you
- Will feel compelled to imagine scene by scene.
Dennis's language here is so quiet and straightforward that when he alters course yet again to imagine the transformation of a god in the mind of his reader, the change seems natural. This is public poetry that sounds private -- an achievement that's easy to underestimate."
In his 1984 review, Tom Sleigh addressed the originality of Dennis' art:
"The reader feels hemmed in by Mr. Dennis's laconic truths because they make visible the narrow cage of circumstance and contingency in which we live. Many poets attempt this, but how many succeed? His distinctive force originates in his insidious determination to stay inside that cage, to map it inch by inch and find there - or nowhere - the justifications for human action."