The painting Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? by Paul Gauguin, intended as the painter's final artistic testimony, is the inspiration and framework for this book. In one way, "The Gauguin Answer Sheet" focuses on the intricate details of the painting and offers its lush Tahitian landscape and characters--a black dog, a pair of conspirators, a shy woman, a pleading goddess, and a crouching mummy, among many others. In another sense, Dennis Finnell deeply probes the underlying implications--and personal associations--the painting offers.

The poem's own questions, suggested by those in the painting's title, are concerned with origins, identities, and futures--of the poet and others. Finnell reflects on the plight of the characters portrayed in Gauguin's painting and imagines their thoughts and feelings about life in the world outside. Along with his ruminations on these imagined characters, Finnell visits his own family history, reflecting on the lives of earlier generations, to affirm the shared nature of each individual's origins and identities. Through his poetry, time and space, painting and history, and imagination and reality interconnect and offer an unusually imaginative, surprising work of art.

Beloved Beast is an American travelogue of sorts, says Dennis Finnell. In part it records a cross-country trek by car and by air from the Catskills to L. A. and halfway back, with encounters along the way with Washington Irving's headless horseman and Rip Van Winkle, Humphrey Bogart's Nick in Knock on Any Door, an ersatz Huck Finn working the tourists in Hannibal, and others. "One might say that these poems are about being an ego", Finnell explains, "an I, America's most highly mythologized product, and how being this American self increasingly means being isolated, a party of one. I suppose the beloved beast is me, is us, our country, our selves, and the poems here trace out the figures of the beast - lyrical, social, cultural".

This book was the winner of the 1990 Juniper Prize, the annual poetry award sponsored by the University of Massachusetts Press. In this collection of poems, Dennis Finnell delves into identity, or what the title piece calls a slender awareness of merged parallels. His subjects range from the apparition of his ancestor Mary Keenan, to Leo Tolstoy and Charlie Parker, to various homes such as St. Louis and Hannibal, Dunstanburgh Castle and the Aleutian Islands. As Finnell explores people, the material world, and language, the variegated self learns to understand that it is the offspring of matter and words, a child whose ears record/ sounds of dead stars. Red Cottage gathers together poems which have for years nurtured and enriched my sense of the humane, illuminating possibilities of poetry. Mr. Finnell has invented, out of the pains of isolation and the pains of unmediated human contact, the most habitable music that I know. The courage of these poems never falters. Their welcome is endless. If you were to ask me where the American language lives, I would, without hesitation, answer 'in Red Cottage.' --Donald Revell, editor, Denver Quarterly