LEAVES FROM THE WORLD TREE: SELECTED POEMS OF CRAIG DEININGER AND DENNIS PATRICK SLATTERY
MANDORLA books, 2018
This collaboration between a teacher and a former student reveals two very different voices and angles on the simple events in daily life. The volume is a testament to the imagination and to the possibilities which can arise, unbidden, through fortunate word-arrangements when one is able to be patient with the creative process.
ROAD, FRAME, WINDOW:
A POETICS OF SEEING. Selected Poems of Timothy Donohue, Donald Carlson and Dennis Patrick Slattery
Mandorla Books, 2015
foreword by jennifer leigh selig
The three metaphors chosen by the poets of this volume are understood as three avenues, perspectives and vistas through which poems arise and from which they can be experienced. Poetry can bring to the surface other worlds that are not generally part of the ego’s way of understanding. Jennifer writes in her elegant Foreword, “You signed your poems paintings over to me, to Mandorla Books, and said yes to their public life. I have taken them over, a labor of love. . .”.
feathered ladder: selected poems of dennis patrick slattery
and brian landis
FISHER KING PRESS, 2014
foreword by stephanie pope
This coauthored volume allowed me the rare opportunity to work with my former student in the Counseling Program at Pacifica Graduate Institute, who then became a dear friend. Brian, as Stephanie Pope points out in her elegant Foreword, is a master storyteller. Together we enjoyed romping through one another’s poetic fields, smelling the grass, feeling the dew on our barefeet and reveling in the grapes of words. I miss our collaboration.
the beauty between words: selected poems of dennis patrick slattery and chris paris
waterforest Press, 2010
foreword by stephanie pope
This Coauthored volume with a former teaching colleague gave us many opportunities to meet for lunch, talk about the power of the poetic image and its effects on culture. Stephanie writes in her Forword that “This is just what I’m suggesting with regards to The Beauty Between Words. I’m suggesting the language of jazz, the language of soul food is at work.”
twisted sky: selected poems
winchester canyon press, 2007
foreword by stephanie pope
Taking seriously mythologist Joseph Campell’s words—“How does the ordinary person come to the transcendent? For a start, I would say, study poetry. Learn how to read a poem” (Thou Art That, 92)—this volume of poetry “is like the liquid spring of our being; it nourishes, negotiates and suffers not to neglect those aspects of our selves starved by the busy desert realms of our busy lives,” I write in the Introduction. Every poem calls out to be meditated on, reflected over, until the poet of the reader joins in the chorus and becomes the poem one contemplates. Such is the stance of imaginal reading.
JUST BELOW THE WATER LINE: SELECTED POEMS
winchester canyon press, 2004
How does poetry relate to prayer? To Depth Psychology? To the mystical tradition of East and West? Poetry pulls us down and in, below the water line of the phenomenal world and into the invisible realms where the soul lives and has its most active voice to see things from the inside out and down under. The important word in the title is “Just.” It is just below, not fathoms down; but you must dive in to locate its grandeur and its Protean insights into the world you breathe in daily.
CASTING THE SHADOWS:
SELECTED POEMS
winchester canyon press, 2001
This is Dennis’ first volume of poetry. The title comes from an instruction offered to him by his good fishing friend Roger, who taught him decades when fly fishing for trout in the Ozarks: “Watch the stream and cast into the water’s running dark spaces, where the shadows are. Cast the shadows.” Seemed like a good catch for a title. The dark places in our lives can harbor the most life, the most energy and the most fun. So trust the shadows of these poems and cast your eyes around each one; look for the dark places, the locales of the imaginal.