In "The Spirit of Defense," ten years after "The State of Things" (Kastaniotis, 1989), Denegris insists on this combination of brief, aphoristic poems (such as: "Loneliness sharpens the senses," "Delicate balances," and "The straw in the darkness") and more extensive, narrative song poems.
Furthermore, he allows himself to wander through the past, in a kind of fruitful leafing through an album with yellowing photographs, to turn a visit to a nursing home, a childhood illness, the holes left by airplane rockets in Saint Sava and the Refugee area from half a century ago into poetry—that feeling of briefly deceiving the pain of unfulfilled love when you're a child (with illustrated books, what else?).
Denegris reminds us how not to forget, how to talk about what no longer has a voice in our times, how to give back to events the music taken from them by indifference and its peer, haste, or even by that rigid moralism that wants to crush the poet's pen in two.
Giorgos-Ikaros Babassakis (The Kathimerini, 14-8-99) ... Innovation is usually a very burdensome factor in poetry; if the outlines are lost, if some shadows do not fall on certain points of the poetic space, then how will the thrill work and how will the disturbance that the verse must convey to the reader arise?
Denegris responds to the question with a very simple method: each of his poems tells the story it has to tell by tracing a small elliptical orbit. Some detail is always missing from the frame he paints, and there, in that barely perceptible void, the spark of a magical disturbance or reminder is ignited.
