A Glass Half Full

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY 13 SEPT 2004

"Stands the glass half empty,/ Or stands the glass half full?/ Hand me the decanter, man,/ I'll take another pull." In September 1999, at the age of 52, while in the hospital for an unspecified disease, Dennis wrote his first poem--inspired by Dorothy Parker's "Resume." What followed is this book of 194 poems (originally published by Hutchinson in the UK), a "spoken word" CD of Dennis reading (accompanied by haunting organ music) and a book tour called "Did I Mention the Free Wine?" According to Miramax, Dennis aims to bring poetry back to the masses. However, occasional poetry readers might be better off sticking with Blake or Billy Collins. After all, Dennis, a multimillionaire and the founder of Maxim magazine, is still a novice poet, and his verses appear to be limited by the idea of what poetry is. Thus, the collection abounds with "thees" and "thous" and gamely adheres to wobbly rhyme schemes. There are glimmers of Dennis's way with words in this volume, mostly when he lets the language relax and his voice shines through. He can be funny and slightly bawdy, such as in the poem "Five and a Bit," which is in the shape of a phallus, or in "The Better Man": "You were the better at rolling reefer,/ I was the better with coke and rum;/ Remember that night on the beach at Ibiza?/ The Maori twins with the tattooed bum?" Interestingly, his true voice also seems to come out in the footnotes. There, he doesn't let awkward rhyme inhibit him, revealing that he plans to be mummified in a "purpose-built pyramid" and detailing the virtues of a "snake-hipped, suede-booted blonde." Taken as prose poems, these footnotes may actually constitute some of the most entertaining, and most polished, works in the book. Illus.