Sailor in the Rain and Other Poems

ISBN 978-0-6151-8555-2. Trade paperback. 136 pages. ISBN 978-0-6151-8497-5. Hardcover with dust jacket. 136 pages. Both are available at Barnes & Noble. The paperback is available at Amazon.

Sailor in the Rain and Other Poems is the well-received collection of Denis M. Garrison's formal and free verse written over the last four decades. Selected for their "Best Books for Summer Reading, 2008" by The Montserrat Review. “Contained in Sailor in the Rain are some of the best poems of an American original, Denis M. Garrison. They are gleaned from previous collections large and small, and are presented in a carefully ordered narrative structure having a beginning, middle, and an end. ... Garrison’s sense of place and region, and his consciousness and reckoning of good and evil, order and chaos, truth and deceit, are all essential to his character as a poet, and that character relates his work to a diverse group of poets who span several centuries and have similar interests and thematic pre-occupations. His ‘Confessio’ might have been written by John Donne, as part of that poet’s series of ‘Holy Sonnets.’ Garrison’s haunted and haunting landscapes relate to similar metaphysical elements found in the earliest American poets and prose masters: Edward Taylor and Philip Freneau, Washington Irving and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Garrison’s concerns with symbolic argument and imagery (including the ambiguous and macabre) find their precursors in Edgar Alan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, and Stéphane Mallarmé—the latter, also, for a shared fascination for the interplay and revelations of style and content that a poet may achieve when pursuing the essence of invented, perfect poetic forms. “In their unfolding and wingbeat, the poems in this collection bear the shape and trajectory of a well-examined life, the environments that have weathered Garrison’s journey, the people, places and ideas he has encountered—figuratively, the shells he has held to his ear to plumb the mysteries of sound, silence, and the oceanic infinities that roll in waves upon the human heart, as upon a beach through the seasons, bringing the tides that shape and re-shape ourselves, our perceptions, and the ground we stand on. ... Garrison is no castaway, ... but is a poet who speaks in full sympathy with all who, like Crusoe, have spent much of their time isolated from the noise and clamor of a noisy, clamorous world, who have found themselves and, having returned to the world from afar, bring to and express in their chosen art the merits of their own private struggle—the wisdom of self-discovery, the strength of self-knowledge, and the confidence to speak with authority about those everlasting things that carry us into the next day, and the day after that. ... Garrison’s engagement with the world and the idioms of idea and emotion is versatile and inventive, neither easy nor safe. The structures he has used to shape and hold his thought are neither arbitrary nor predictable, but always exploratory. Occasionally, we must run to catch up or, caught in a close-up that takes our breath away, we must pause, stand back from the scene, and recover a perspective that permits us the luxury and comfort of objective distance.” —Michael McClintock, in his Preface to Sailor in the Rain and Other Poems. • Back to the Selected Books page.