"Collected Poems: 1961-2000"

Forty years in the writing and a year in making, Richard Denner's "Collected Poems:1961-2000" has just been released from Comrades Press, utilizing digital print-on-demand technology. Comrades has a mission, editor Verian Thomas says, to produce a book that "grabs you by the throat and demands to be read or picks away at the back of your brain until there is no choice but to go for it."

Richard Denner was uneducated in Berkeley, California, during the 60s, self-exiled into the Alaskan woods, printing on a 1927 Kesey hand press small, smudgy chapbooks, graduated from University of Alaska, Fairbanks, 1972, continued printing while working at Queen Anne News in Seattle, moved with family to 800 acre cattle ranch east of Ellensburg, Washington, to punch cows and write hayseed verses, finally finding a career as the proprietor of Fourwinds Bookstore & Café, settling down to civic responsibilities, Masonic Order, alcoholism and a total freak-out after separating from the most beautiful woman in the world, finding happiness in the teachings of Buddha, 1989, moving to Tara Mandala Retreat Center in Colorado to manage another bookstore and do a long retreat until called back to California in 1997 to care for his elderly parents, staying on after his father's death to write, publish and teach at Summerfield, a Waldorf school near Santa Rosa. He is adjusting to his role as an elder.

INTERIOR ROSE

for Beryl

I turn myself into a bar room.

Drunks roll from my armpits.

Awake all night in the gray light,

smudges become masterpieces.

*

I see you see clearly as we share solitude.

The body will decay,

Don't delay.

Our words make light everywhere we look.

The body will decay.

Don't delay.

*

I like you liking me.

I like it, I like it,

I like it.

I could be in Mexico.

A voice says, "Go,"

but I can't resist

being here with you.

I like it, I like it,

I like it.

As I opened a 20 pound box mailed from Santa Rosa, chapbooks flooded my table, and I wondered how I could begin to encompass such a literary sea (and most of Richard's work is out of print). Seamus Heany's old headmaster used to look over his writing and sigh, "Ah, pure Hopkins" or "Ah, pure Checkov." My eyes swim through this tidal wave of excellence, collage covers which steal my breath, Leonardo illustrations, such brillig poems, and I can only whisper in awe, "Ah, pure Denner." -Lee Harris (from the Introduction, D Press: A Jewel In The Net)