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aprilaprilapril's review against another edition
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
5.0
A wonderful collection filled with the poet's honest and intimate voice. Very gentle, and always feels open-hearted (never suffocating or grave even when concerning death or despair). The poems are located in the everyday moments of choice, exasperation, contemplation - the abode of practical gods. Think an observer watching a father and son pick out a gift for the mother and envisioning their domestic lives and futures, or the poem where a guardian angel is one who advices against the plaid shirt that will thwart your romantic destiny. I noticed that the poems are always about more than one person, and there is a special camaraderie in that. I also love how the poems ponder the many possible futures of a person and then reconciles with the melancholic truth that only one future will ever happen.
kayla_can_read's review against another edition
reflective
fast-paced
5.0
And may God look at you and see the path you’ve chosen other than what may have been
seebrandyread's review against another edition
4.0
I'm fascinated by literature that explores the paradoxical, something being two opposite things at the same time or the way opposites are also complements. Carl Dennis's poems in Practical Gods are, by virtue of being about higher powers, about contradictory truths. By ruminating on the ways the human world intersects with the godly one, he reveals how one is predicated on the other, the way we often can't understand an object or idea without understanding it's opposite.
The collection touches on many aspects of the godly from the actual gods like Hermes and the Judeo-Christian God, to higher beings like angels and priests, or the mythology surrounding them like the Oddyssey or book of Numbers from the Bible. More often, however, the poems are interested in conceptual properties of religion and faith like eternal life and the fate of the soul, sin, and intercession. Can the earthly be made holy or is it already holy because the divine concerns itself with it?
Though Dennis's poems are certainly about lofty topics and delve into deep philosophical waters, he typically begins them at a point of humanness. Sometimes this is as simple as writing from the POV of someone else like Eurydice or Adam. Other times he imagines the world with a different relationship to the holy like what an interaction with his neighbor might be like if The Fall had never happened. He also looks at how man transcends into the god-like, mainly through art but also by questioning whether we have any actual control over our selves.
The title has a double meaning: How do we practice belief? Are we gods of the practical? Most of these poems ask how do we use faith or belief in our daily lives and whether it makes any sense to do so. Does it matter if we're destined to make certain choices if we can never know the consequences of making different ones? If every choice we make matters, why aren't we guided in the small ones as much as the large? What are we to think when the world's problems never seem to get better despite all our prayers and best efforts? Is it time to choose different gods?
The collection touches on many aspects of the godly from the actual gods like Hermes and the Judeo-Christian God, to higher beings like angels and priests, or the mythology surrounding them like the Oddyssey or book of Numbers from the Bible. More often, however, the poems are interested in conceptual properties of religion and faith like eternal life and the fate of the soul, sin, and intercession. Can the earthly be made holy or is it already holy because the divine concerns itself with it?
Though Dennis's poems are certainly about lofty topics and delve into deep philosophical waters, he typically begins them at a point of humanness. Sometimes this is as simple as writing from the POV of someone else like Eurydice or Adam. Other times he imagines the world with a different relationship to the holy like what an interaction with his neighbor might be like if The Fall had never happened. He also looks at how man transcends into the god-like, mainly through art but also by questioning whether we have any actual control over our selves.
The title has a double meaning: How do we practice belief? Are we gods of the practical? Most of these poems ask how do we use faith or belief in our daily lives and whether it makes any sense to do so. Does it matter if we're destined to make certain choices if we can never know the consequences of making different ones? If every choice we make matters, why aren't we guided in the small ones as much as the large? What are we to think when the world's problems never seem to get better despite all our prayers and best efforts? Is it time to choose different gods?
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