Description
- Kind: Perfectbound
- Pages: 112
- Language: English
- Date Published: June 2026
- ISBN 978-1-962847-56-8
Praise
Dennis Daly’s book of poems, Metaphysical Commentaries and Other Poems, is a tour de force of formal ingenuity in which he plumbs the human quest’s fraught and sometimes contrarily insouciant encounter with mortality and destiny. “Through the stars, which salt the ominous sky, / Comes the grim message of desolation,” the poet declares in “Rendezvous,” while in “Life’s Reach” he affirms “the hands of the world complete creation.” The at once sublime and desperate influence of this double-bind, indeed this double-consciousness, haunts the poems. Probative, aphoristic, at times downright funny and always witty in the true metaphysical vein of John Donne, Daly’s poems are obsessive in their ultimate concerns and rangy in the terms and figures of their regard—from theology to chemistry and physics. The sonnets, ghazals, and plethora of pantoums in the book’s first two sections offer a dazzling spectrum of recognitions, not least of which is the hope that, just possibly, “Together we become what was never, / What was before time, a perfect somewhere.” A similar hope lifts the reader in the book’s final eponymous section, his monumental riff of Omar Khayam’s “Rubáiyát,” where he writes: “At the end of everything stands being, /A consciousness, both illimitable / And radiating, yet ego freeing. / Here man concludes, centered and all-seeing.” Such a moment of expansive vision refuses, still, to deny “Futures follow futures. So do mass graves.” In the end, what Metaphysical Commentaries offers is nothing less than the poet’s own wild and inveterate “dreamscapes / Of polished words that seem to form themselves.” —Daniel Tobin, author of Dusk, Empire: New and Selected Poems 1987-2024
Excerpt
The Devil Dreamt
One rainy morning the devil dreamt,
He postulated an upright man,
The guardian of our firmament,
Dread commander of our caravan.
He postulated an upright man
To what end only the godless know.
Dread commander of our caravan,
His methods shake up the status quo.
To what end only the godless know,
Those hitherto unmovable clods.
His methods shake up the status quo,
The chorus above applauds, applauds.
Those hitherto unmovable clods
Look to the future of selfless bents,
The chorus above applauds, applauds,
Still here and steadfast, the man repents.
Look to the future of selfless bents,
The guardian of our firmament,
Still here and steadfast, the man repents.
One rainy morning the devil dreamt.
Author
Dennis Daly lives in Salem. Massachusetts with his wife Joanne. They have four adult children. Daly graduated from Boston College and earned an M.A. in English Literature from Northeastern University. He has previously published eleven books of poetry and poetic translations. His most recent books are Psalms Composed in Utter Darkness (Dos Madres, 2023) and Odd Man Out (MadHat Press, 2024). Many of Daly’s translations of Alisher Navoiy’s ghazals were published in Uyghur Poems, as part of Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets (Alfred A. Knopf, Random House). Among other jobs, Daly has worked as a dockworker, a union leader of a 9000-member industrial local, a city department head, and a community corrections director. He has traveled widely in central Asia. Please visit his blog here: dennisfdaly.blogspot.com.
