We Weep for Our Strangeness

Dennis Schmitz is an original among American poets because of his knotty, lucid classical sensibility. These bucolic poems and elegies explore such experiences as the birth of a foal, the slow, miraculous growth of a glacier, and how a man can “grow from the inside/like a tree breaks whole from the seed.” These are the kind of poems one returns to when one feels that edgy, unmistakeable, pure desire to read poetry in “all its rawness.”