"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?"

"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."

"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."

• A House of My Own (George Braziller, 1974)
• Climbing Down (George Braziller, 1976)
• Signs and Wonders (Princeton University Press, 1979)
• The Near World (William Morrow, 1985)
• The Outskirts of Troy (William Morrow, 1988)
• Meetings with Time (Viking Penguin, 1992)
• Ranking the Wishes (Penguin, 1997)
• Practical Gods (Penguin, 2001)
• Poetry as Persuasion, an Essay for Writers (University of Georgia Press, 2001)
• New and Selected Poems, 1974-2004 (Penguin, 2004)
• Unknown Friends (Penguin, 2007). ISBN 978-0143038757 .