Here Be Dragons

Dennis Greene's poetry is meditative, wry and questing, with surprising eruptions of strangeness. It is built deftly and surely, grounded in subtleties and nuances of crafting and structuring; individual poems gather together as a greater tonal architecture. Literary shades such as Yeats, Wilfred Owen and Blake provide points of engagement or departure; as do figures like Magellan, Churchill, Darwin. Shakespeare murmurs ever-present in the wings. With curiosity and insistency Greene finds poems hidden in the light and shade of the everyday - in husband and father-hood, domesticity, the West Australian landscape. With quirky narratives both mythic and quotidian, moving discoveries, messages in bottles, he might be one of the explorers he writes about, returned but taking us via tellings and re-tellings to the edge of the mapped, the known, for shiver-and-goosebump glimpses of 'dragons'. "These poems speak immediately: a calm and thoughtful voice grows through their images and observations. They get into the reader by a stealth that is wonderfully devious, extremely likeable and not by special effects or dramas. They are also expansions of quiet humour, long and deeply engaging echoes of 'being'." - Philip Salom "Dennis Greene asks us to look again at what we already know. This poet's hand, in language tempered by humility, holds time aside, waits for the mystery to come forward from its shadow, and meticulously records its impressions. Greene is a giving poet. He offers us a 'world through unfocused eyes' and shows us how to look again." - Morgan Yasbincek