The Things I Notice Now by Dennis Maloney
“This is a book of amazing range. Dennis Maloney is equally at home with ancient Japanese forms and the memory of hearing Janis Joplin at the Fillmore. Moving with confidence among continents and centuries, the poems have an uncanny immediacy that makes us feel as if the voice is always right here, right now. As one of our most accomplished translators, Maloney seems to have mastered the art of being invisible, so that his poems sing their human songs untethered from any particular autobiography, though they dip in and out of many. In this sense the book has multiple voices, all of which speak with the gravitas of age and experience while somehow preserving an arresting freshness of vision. Easy of access, playful, profound, surprising, and often quietly heartbreaking, The Things I Notice Now is the work of a poet writing at the height of his powers.”
—Chase Twichell
“Dennis Maloney’s lifelong immersion in poetry from distant lands leads him now to notice worlds of possibilities in everything he encounters—a plum tree, a bowl, a spider’s web. He writes, ‘A few words woven together to make a home.’ Indeed he makes a home wherever he finds himself, in memory, in the present moment, and in the company of the dead—in Buffalo, Kyoto, the Salinas Valley. What he memorializes, in poems that are at once wise and riveting, makes all the difference.”
—Christopher Merrill
“Reading Dennis Maloney’s newest collection, The Things I Notice Now, I was reminded of Rilke’s great and eternal beauty. Maloney passes through time and space to bring us the world, from the Great Wall of China to ’60s Haight-Ashbury. A first-class noticer, his tanka are quietly observant, rich in complexity. ‘A good poem / should smell of tea, / earth or newly split wood,’ Maloney writes. These are good poems indeed.”
—Ellen Bass
—Chase Twichell
“Dennis Maloney’s lifelong immersion in poetry from distant lands leads him now to notice worlds of possibilities in everything he encounters—a plum tree, a bowl, a spider’s web. He writes, ‘A few words woven together to make a home.’ Indeed he makes a home wherever he finds himself, in memory, in the present moment, and in the company of the dead—in Buffalo, Kyoto, the Salinas Valley. What he memorializes, in poems that are at once wise and riveting, makes all the difference.”
—Christopher Merrill
“Reading Dennis Maloney’s newest collection, The Things I Notice Now, I was reminded of Rilke’s great and eternal beauty. Maloney passes through time and space to bring us the world, from the Great Wall of China to ’60s Haight-Ashbury. A first-class noticer, his tanka are quietly observant, rich in complexity. ‘A good poem / should smell of tea, / earth or newly split wood,’ Maloney writes. These are good poems indeed.”
—Ellen Bass
