To the Left of the Worshiper
Jeffrey Greene
"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
about the author
Jeffrey Greene received his MFA from the University of Iowa and his Ph.D from the University of Houston. His most recent book, French Spirits: A House, a Village and a Love Affair in Burgundy, was published by Morrow/HarperCollins. His is also the author of American Spirituals (chosen by Carolyn Kizer for the 1998 Samuel French Morse Prize, Northeastern UP), and a chapbook, Glimpses of the Invisible World in New Haven (1995). He was a winner of the Randall Jarrell Prize and the "Discovery"/The Nation Award and received prizes from The Denver Quarterly and The Southern California Anthology. His work has been supported by the NEA, Connecticut Commission on the Arts, The Vermont Studio Center, and the Mary Rinehart Fund. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Nation, Parnassus, The North American Review, The Sewanee Review, Boulevard, American Scholar, The Southwest Review, The Iowa Review, Ploughshares, Columbia, The Southern Review, and many other journals and anthologies.
