Collection of existentialist poetry by David Denny ... There are moments in life that resist easy telling — experiences that settle deep in the gut, or buzz like static at the back of the mind. This collection is an attempt to name those moments, to hold them briefly in the palm before they vanish again into sea-mist, smoke, dream. These are poems of reckoning and return — to childhood shores, to lost fathers, to empty sheds and broken mirrors, to questions half-whispered at the world’s edge.
The Beach began with the desire to listen closely to the rhythms of ordinary life — the clank of tools, the whisper of breath on the pillow, the knock at the door — and to let those rhythms unfold into something stranger, something luminous. The sea appears often here, not as backdrop, but as participant: witness, mirror, grave. Animals, too, move among the lines, not as symbols, but as kin. And ghosts — many ghosts — both named and not.
I owe a debt to the poets who’ve shown how the mythic and the mundane walk side by side: Hughes with his elemental thrum, Heaney with his spade and his song, and others who dared to speak plainly of difficult things. These poems do not seek to explain, but to evoke. To echo the long ache of loss. To hold briefly the fragile gleam of joy. To make sense, if only for a moment, of what it means to endure.
Thank you for reading. Wherever these poems find you — by tide or by tarmac — may they offer a little silence, a little heat, a little company.
DavidDennybookshop