To the Left of the Worshiper

the long version

“*To the Left of the Worshiper* is a book of rare lyrical attentiveness and sympathy, of external landscapes that signify inwards, of childhood lost and found and lost again, of separation and arrivals, of modern love and the quest for a redeeming human faith. I savor these poems for their craftsmanship, their emotional precision, and their abiding sense of the heart’s inner workings and mysteries.” —Edward Hirsch “For all the geography proposed in his poems—Houston, coastal Connecticut, Bayou Louisiana, San Francisco, Paris—and for all the years accounted for in the preparation of this his first book, Jeffrey Greene’s strong voice is resonantly of a piece and secured: located in a firm spiritual identity. Greene’s mode is to allow the detail, the moment, its own developing ignition, its own opportunity to fill out the figure. Many of these poems, in fact, are journey-narratives; stories that build their epiphanies out of the emotion pressure of a larger and immanent imaginative world, a world immediately around the poem, to the left of the worshiper.” —Stanley Plumly