Praise for Dominion + Selected Poems
Dennis Hinrichsen is an astute observer of the world, lending the full force of his senses to the task, rendering surfaces and probing its substrata with immaculate lyricism. He is also gifted with a revelatory inward eye, probing memory’s darker caves and the grim future of our planet with equal precision and devotion. Dominion + Selected Poems is a treasure trove of his most poignant poems and a record of a poetic conscience at its most elevated and elevating. —Khaled Mattawa
The four-decade trajectory of Dennis Hinrichsen’s poetry epitomizes a classic American version of aesthetic self-fashioning and refashioning. Every style Hinrichsen creates he then breaks and remakes. In this way, he has recapitulated, more than once, the great changes undertaken by major postwar poets like Merwin, Rich, and Wright. I’ve followed his impatient art through its every decade, in recent years quickening my pace to keep up. Few poets write with greater imaginative restlessness (even as the heart holds steady), and no poet more deserves a retrospective of this sort. —Steven Cramer
One thing that makes these poems extraordinary, and there are many, is the way they give us multiple surprising routes deep into the familiar. The conduit is richly metaphoric language that’s passionate, intimate, inventive, unafraid of what it might discover, and clear. What mysteries, the poems ask, underlie our ordinary emotions, memories, inquiries of mind? Each poem answers that question with meticulous precision, mapping out the ways the extraordinary, numinous, sometimes ruined world is right here, if only we know where to look. And we must look, say the poems, because the mysteries of our lives turn out to be the meaning of our lives. —Chase Twichell
Bringing a museum to his poems—a confluence of architectural, harmonic, atonal, geometric, choreographic, photographic, subatomic, incongruously new and enlivened experiences—Dennis Hinrichsen welcomes our participation in the power of ambiguity. For this writer, everything belongs with everything, and anything belongs with anything. Dominion + Selected Poems reveals the span of his astonishing vision, a vision that leads me into awe. —Jack Ridl
I had already read and loved the books from which the selected poems in Dominion were taken, but I have to say: the marvel of so many great Hinrichsen poems under a single cover announces his mastery in no uncertain manner. Hinrichsen’s language—his command of image and metaphor—possesses a power to perform a sort of transubstantiation, by which the ordinary we might see or experience becomes a wholly new substance, real in a different way, formally inventive, further fleshed out, and, in many cases, delightfully stranger. —Justin Hamm
“Was there any spirit in it?” asks Dennis Hinrichsen in Dominion + Selected Poems, and his poems respond kaleidoscopically. It’s been a gift to read my way across the expanse of this dominion, this keen curation of poems that “must have / wept as they bled as they sang” across decades of Hinrichsen’s work and the turn of the millennium. Wheeling through this poetry, I feel myself drawn to its commitment to the radical—both deeply rooted and daringly extreme. There’s a “current in it like a corkscrew,” a wandering yet patterned musical buzz like “low wattage radio pitching doo wop-vascular-static / to the dark.” Book after book, Hinrichsen has “polished the shock” of language so that we might bear witness to its strange gleam. But his dynamic lexicon goes well beyond language play. It’s always tugging at the seams between the mundane and the holy. Hinrichsen’s poems are deft variegations, in turns wondering in earnest then questioning askance the possibilities of mercy, of regret, of death, of working among the living. The poet won’t let us forget the “abyss is always leaking,” but after reading Dominion I can’t help but agree that, yes: “there is—I think—still time for this.” —Aaron Coleman
