An Opening in the Vertical World

Most of the poems in An Opening in the Vertical World, Roger Greenwald's fourth collection, emerge from travel in northern Europe, with vivid evocations growing more meditative as the book proceeds. Encounters with music or visual art appear throughout, and the book closes with a poem inspired by modern dance. In short lyric poems but especially in longer pieces, Greenwald braids narrative, idea, and emotional import into a musical structure carried by the voice, in which rhythm, sound patt...