Clearing the Stream: New & Selected Poems 1975–2025 by Dennis Maloney
Publisher: Walton Well Press
Date Available: June 2026
Length: 156 pagesISBN 978-1-964295-16-9
Format: 6 by 9 inched, paperback
Price: $17.99Available June 15, 2026
Clearing the Stream gathers fifty years of Dennis Maloney's poems into a single collection—a sustained record of one poet's attention to the world. He writes with equal care about a calligrapher's brush and the catastrophes of war, about snowfall and legacy, about remaining awake to beauty without turning away from harm. Rather than circling a single autobiographical self, these poems open into something more spacious: a way of being in the world that readers are invited to share.
ADVANCE PRAISE
“Clearing the Stream celebrates a half-century of Dennis Maloney’s poetic journey with a collection that longs to hold the world gently: ‘We are fragile vessels / anchoring sky to earth.’ I so admire how these poems carry a deep compassion for stillness, for life, and for the natural world. His work offers the kind of clarity and grace we need in this present moment—meditations, moments like a shimmering streetlight asking: ‘How is your world?’ Maloney’s poems are at once lyrical and political, intimate and expansive, responding to the question: ‘What shall remain / as my legacy? And what is the answer? ‘ Presence, birdsong, snowfall, a calligrapher’s brush, memory, beauty. What a radiant collection, what an offering of a life lived in poetry, what an absolutely stunning book of poems for us to hold.”
—Kelli Russell Agodon, author of Accidental Devotions
“With Clearing the Stream, Dennis Maloney gathers the currents of a half century of his deep and abiding relationship with the page. This gathering bears witness to a life lived mindfully and full of heart and history and profound awareness of the natural world. Truly, these poems are a testament and a delight.”
—Joe Wilkins, author of The Entire Sky & When We Were Birds
“Over the decades, Dennis Maloney’s poems have always pointed to ‘the urgency of life itself’; the new poems collected here include some of the most quietly devastating imaginings of war I’ve ever read. This book contains a half of a century of meticulous, clear-headed study of the self, not who it is, but what it is, yet the poems are never, ever about the self. They float free of a single identity, which is beautiful and rare.”
—Chase Twichell, author of Things As It Is
About the Author
Dennis Maloney is a poet and translator. In his younger days, he worked a number of jobs including farm laborer, drugstore clerk, factory worker, answering the hit line for a top forty radio station, and garbage man. He received his BS in Environmental Science/Landscape Architecture from the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry in 1973 and worked for over three decades for the City of Buffalo designing parks.
A number of volumes of his own poetry have been published including: The Map Is Not the Territory, Just Enough, Listening to Tao Yuan Ming, The Things I Notice Now, The Faces of Guan Yin and Windows. A bilingual German/English volume, Empty Cup was published in Germany in 2017. His work has been translated into over a dozen languages including full-length collections in German, Japanese and Bulgarian.
His works of translation include: The Stones of Chile by Pablo Neruda, The Landscape of Castile by Antonio Machado, Between the Floating Mist: Poems of Ryokan, and The Poet and the Sea by Juan Ramón Jiménez. He is the editor and publisher of the widely-respected White Pine Press in Buffalo, New York.
Author portrait by Eva Teneva-Zaikoff
