Where the Eye Leads the Head Soon Follows by Dennis Finnell

"In Finnell's new poems and sequences, we are permitted or, rather, compelled to experience the Orphic afterlife of American idioms and of America's discarded futurity. Like figures stepping away from a painting by Hopper, or like passages from a song by Ives just heard in a dream, Finnell's images and sounds are both familiar and strange, kindred and uncanny. They are dearly, direly welcome, and unforgettable."

—Donald Revell, Canandaigua, Alice James Books


Discover in Dennis Finnell’s Where the Eye Leads the Head Soon Follows the two core imperatives of great poetry—to use language in a fresh way and to say something that matters.  Imagine coming to a crossing of five roads and the poet’s first exclamation, “eternity here,” followed soon by the mystical image of “the sky   with cow paths.”  Finnell is among American masters for his ability to ground us in the world and transcend it, from an archetypal auto mechanic “winking at Mobil’s revolving horse” to Mantegna’s Jesus, “your head’s God, / your feet us.” Such connections—call it awareness—celebrate human resilience, personal and global, as with “a few acorns forgotten / under the national soot.”  Here is an intense and absolutely authentic ear for American language.

—Robert Stewart, Higher (winner Prize Americana)


“The irreality of daily life requires a keen sense of sight, open ears, and an advanced sense of humor, all of which are on abundant display in Dennis Finnell’s wonderful “Where the Eye Leads the Head Soon Follows.” This is a book of windows that reconfigures sight, and even as the poems’ visual logic proves that “what is outside a window” is “not yours, not mine” and even “the yellow leaves are gerrymandered,” it is a world that is nevertheless still ours, and Finnell is its faithful agent. (“Maybe Tomorrow Will Show Up”). Too, this is a book of days as they really occur, familiar in their unfamiliarity, days made from the parts seen and heard synecdochically, where a dog is a tail that keeps the beat, and father is reduced (advanced?) finally to the three legs of the Sphinx’s riddle, or to a musical saw (“The Other Day,” “Just Heard”). And this is a book that could just as well have been titled “What the Ears Hear the Head Soon Follows” as the masterful fugal structure of Finnell’s “translation” of Cy Twombly’s exhibition “The Brown Correspondences” achieves sonically what Twombly did visually in his transcript of a relationship between the artist and a collector.  Dennis Finnell has expanded the reach of American poetry with this book..  Read it!”

—Claudia Keelan, We Step into the Sea: New and Selected Poems, Barrow Street Press



Dennis Finnell has published six books of poems, most recently a Selected Poems from FutureCycle Press. His first book is Red Cottage, which won the Juniper Prize from the University of Massachusetts Press. His next two books, Beloved Beast, selected by Albert Goldbarth, and The Gauguin Answer Sheet, selected by Mark Strand, were chosen for the Contemporary Poetry Series from the University of Georgia Press. Pie 8 was awarded the 2012 Bellday Poetry Prize, selected by Rae Armantrout, and Ruins Assembling, chosen by Jody Stewart, was awarded the 2012 Things to Come Poetry Prize from Shape&Nature Press.

In addition to teaching at various colleges and universities, including the University of Tennessee, Mount Holyoke College, and Wilkes University, he’s had over thirty other jobs, from work on a Chevrolet Pickup Truck assembly line to writing training materials for major U.S. businesses. Born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri, he has lived with his wife in western Massachusetts for some years.



Book Information:

· Paperback:74 pages

· Binding: Perfect-Bound

· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] 

· ISBN: 978-1-60964-511-3

$18