To the Left of the Worshiper

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