Clearing the Stream
Available now from Walton Well Press
Clearing the Stream celebrates a half-century of Dennis Maloney's poetic journey with a collection that longs to hold the world gently: We are fragile vessels / anchoring sky to earth! I so admire how these poems carry a deep compassion for stillness, for life, and for the natural world. His work offers the kind of clarity and grace we need in this present moment-meditations, moments like a shimmering streetlight asking: How is your world? Maloney's poems are at once lyrical and political, intimate and expansive, responding to the question: What shall remain/ as my legacy? And what is the answer? ' Presence, birdsong, snowfall, a calligrapher's brush, memory, beauty. What a radiant collection, what an offering of a life lived in poetry, what an absolutely stunning book of poems for us to hold."
- Kelli Russell Agodon, author of Accidental Devotions
PRAISE
With Clearing the Stream, Dennis Maloney gathers the currents of a half century of his deep and abiding relationship with the page. This gathering bears witness to a life lived mindfully and full of heart and history and profound awareness of the natural world. Truly, these poems are a testament and a delight.
-Joe Wilkins, author of The Entire Sky and When We Were Birds
Over the decades, Dennis Maloney's poems have always pointed to 'the urgency of life itself; the new poems collected here include some of the most quietly devastating imaginings of war I've ever read. This book contains a half of a century of meticulous, clear-headed study of the self, not who it is, but what it is, yet the poems are never, ever about the self. They float free of a single identity, which is beautiful and rare
-Chase Twitchell, author of Things As It Is