Also available at Broadway Books, 1714 NE Broadway, Portland, Oregon.
In death will come, poet Bill Denham attempts what is nearly impossible, coming to terms with the approaching end of life without nostalgia or sentimentality. And in this collection, he succeeds, offering his astonishing gift to the world, a testament to a life lived, suffered, and loved in open-hearted service and wonder. The poems are interrelated confessions that speak directly to Denham's mother, to his father, to his estranged daughters. They reveal with painful, lyric candor, what it is to struggle with self-knowing in the face of death. A must read for anyone who will someday pass from this world.
Listen to Bill Denham's interview with Henry McCarthy here:
Poets and Writers : Henry McCarthy : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
death will come is a book of poignant, interrelated poems, confessions that speak—in direct address—to the poet’s mother, his father, his estranged daughters. Grappling with knowing who he was and is, Bill Denham gives us the painful, lyric candor of someone who can hold himself “…in the light of/ that knowing/ and rejoice/ in that light.”
Paulann Petersen
Oregon Poet Laureate Emerita
This beautiful collection of poems tells its story through honest moments, both simple and shattering, reflecting a quiet redemption in which not all is lost and not all is found.
Kim Vanderheiden
artist, author, Words that Glimmer, Words that Break: working with the torn things toward the right to be human, owner, Painted Tongue Press, Oakland, California.
In death will come, poet Bill Denham attempts the near impossible, coming to terms with the approaching end of life without nostalgia, sentimentality, self-aggrandizement, or any of the other traps into which we mortals fall. That he succeeds so completely is his astonishing gift to the world, and a testament to a life lived, suffered, and loved in open-hearted service and wonder. A must read for anyone who will someday pass from this world.
Gary Turchin
poet, author of Falling Home and The Healthiest Man on Earth, a documentary of his struggle with Parkinson’s.
Honesty, struggle, and hope are words that describe Bill Denham’s poems in this collection of memories and confessions. Through the medium of poetry Denham holds up to the light stories of loss and death that in the telling become seeds of new life. “Telling stories is our most constant activity,” he writes, using the image of a Russian matryoshka doll, with our stories nesting inside the stories of our parents and their parents backward in time, yet emerging through to the present “to make a larger light against the darkness.”
Nancy Thomas
poet, author of The Secret Colors of God, and Close to the Ground