Carl Dennis

Though most of the virtues that interest Carl Dennis in Earthly Virtues have traditional names, they are provided with contexts that give them fresh implications, moving us in two directions at once, toward a recognition of limits and a recognition of possibilities. On one hand, they confront what it means to lack the knowledge and power we need to make our lives as consequential as we may want them to be. On the other, they reach out to widen the circle of our concern, suggesting a kinship of the local with the distant, enlarging the passing moment with history and prophecy. Wherever the poems turn, they prove spacious enough to take us with them, and they leave us grateful for the journey.

A masterful new collection of poetry from the winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the Ruth Lilly Prize The poems in Carl Dennis's thirteenth collection, Night School, are informed by an engagement with a world not fully accessible to the light of day, a world that can only be known with help from the imagination, whether we focus on ourselves, on people close at hand, or on the larger society. Only if we imagine alternatives to our present selves, Dennis suggests, can we begin to grasp who we are. Only if we imagine what is hidden from us about the lives of others can those lives begin to seem whole. Only if we can conceive of a social world different from the one we seem to inhabit can we begin to make sense of the country we call our own. To read these poems is to find ourselves invited into a dialogue between what is present and what is absent that proves surprising and enlarging.