Maine Poet Dennis Camire Publishes New Collection, Shares Garden Meditation on Legacy and Loss

AUBURN, Maine — Dennis Camire, a longtime figure in the state's poetry community, has released a new collection titled "Anthology of Awe and Wonder" through Deerbrook Editions. The poet, who teaches and tutors writing at Central Maine Community College, also recently debuted a deeply personal poem, "My Father's Garden Tools," which traces a son's inheritance of garden implements into a meditation on mortality, memory, and the ways love endures long after a person is gone.

In the poem, Camire describes visits from his father, who, coping with bad hips and macular degeneration, gradually passes along tools from his own shed: a trowel, a gravel rake, polished flower snips, a pole pruner, a bulb planter, a weeding hoe, an antique pruning saw, and finally a rusted watering wand. Each object becomes a vessel for recollection, evoking images of the elder Camire "waxed poetic on good insects," sharing fertilizer recipes for sweet corn, and grafting apple saplings with his son.

"Opened me to the beauty in healing / broken things from unlike species," Camire writes, describing the moment he and his father fused the trunks and scions of apple trees.

The poem resists despair even as it acknowledges its shadow. Camire writes of "dodging gloom of his imminent death" while poking through the shed, and later imagines his father "so close to being nothing but compost and a soul / skinny dipping the hierarchies' liquid light." Yet grief, the poet argues, need not be an ending. Let it, he writes, "sprout the wild thistle / alongside her invasive Japanese beetles," because every future summer those tools "will be heavy with his affections."

The closing image is one of stubborn, almost defiant continuation: a father's love that can "forever be farmed / no matter how dry, frozen or alkaline / the ground," persisting even through the winter cold of a rusted watering wand.

Camire's career has made him a fixture of Maine's literary landscape. He previously served as director of Maine Poetry Central and founded The Portland Poet Laureate Program. His poems have appeared in The Mid-American Review, Poetry East, and Spoon River Review, among other journals. In a characteristically Maine-flavored side pursuit, he also serves as the "spokes-poet" for Soil Foods, a family-owned company that farms worms for worm castings.

The poem "My Father's Garden Tools," ©2026 by Dennis Camire, appears by permission of the author and was featured in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance.