It's a strange experience to be here speaking about Dennis because I can still hardly fathom the fact that he's no longer with us. I still expect to bump into him, to carry on the conversation with him – the one ongoing conversation about poetry that we'd been having on and off for thirty odd years. It seems like a moment since we stood and chatted in Hodges Figgis in Dublin. He was buying presents, concentrating hard and looking a little lost in the non-poetry section of the shop, on his way to a poetry launch. He'd been to visit some of his beloved art galleries in the afternoon. Bookshop, galleries, poetry launch: a typical urban routine. The things that mattered. What did we talk about? Poetry, of course. We never really talked about anything else. What we were reading, what we were working on. I chanced an inquiry about his health but he swatted it aside, as always.
I suppose in one way I couldn't say that I knew Dennis well. He was an intensely private man, and he had a lot of charming strategies to protect that privacy. Charm and privacy went hand in hand. I knew him as a poet, an artist, I knew him as a companion on the road to the strange destination that poetry is, and as with all companions, they're so much part of the road, the journey, you think they'll always be there.
As long as I've been writing, I've been aware of Dennis. When I was about twenty I remember going to see him give a talk on eastern European poetry. In his beard and tweeds, he struck me as a distinguished, slightly Dostoyevskian figure, yet he was no more than a few years older than me. He was by then a regular critic for Hibernia, sharp, unsentimental, interested in what was going on outside this small island. A little later I became aware of the early books Kist and Hidden Damages. Later, Dennis often dismissed his first book as callow but I've long learned never to trust poets on their own work, and Dennis' early work is full of fine things – some of which I know we'll year today.
We often say that someone has a powerful presence yet find it hard to pinpoint the focus or the pulse of that presence. In Dennis's case a number of related things came together. There was his own work: the powerful, uncompromising poems, the essays and reviews, there was the personal presence: the encouraging word or postcard, the never exhausted fund of praise, the sense that whatever poetry was produced in the world he was somehow its first audience.
