An Opening in the Vertical World

An Opening in the Vertical World by Roger Greenwald. Boston, Commonwealth Books, Black Widow, 2024. 76 pp. US$19.95. (paperback)

If you scour An Opening in the Vertical World for words of loneliness you'll come up with a very meager harvest. I found, for example, only two alones, one loner, two variations on lonely, and exactly zero instances of solitude. And yet, if this collection, Roger Greenwald's fourth, is about anything, it is about loneliness.

Born in New Jersey, transplanted to Canada a long lifetime ago, and perhaps best known as a translator of Scandinavian poetry, Greenwald—at least as he presents himself in his poetry—seems a man who has moved about a great deal, a man who has never quite extricated himself from some layover in some anonymous airport or misty harbour at the edge of the map. Fittingly, Layover is the title of An Opening's first section. It begins with "1969", a poem perhaps named for the year Greenwald first wandered off into the world, and which ends with:

But by now the tiny airplane has crossed Labrador,
pushed into the blue Atlantic; and the outside temperature
is minus fifty-nine.

In these three lines we discover Greenwald's persona and his world: the not-very-significant self (tiny airplane), the exhilarating beyond (pushed into the blue Atlantic), the fearsome, indifferent outside (Labrador, / ... the outside temperature / is minus fifty-nine.).

Look carefully, though, and read again before jumping to conclusions about Greenwald's loneliness. It is not alienation. This is not a writer who will ever awaken to find himself transformed into a bug, or who, like Attila József, will kneel down on the railway tracks and wait for a train. This is a man for whom the world has a place, even a comfortable place, but a place that is seemingly always not quite home. As he writes in "Side Trips":

But then, my house too is only an outpost
in a city I did not come from,
and the city I came from was not where I was born

If you spend a bit of time with An Opening you will discover also another dimension to Greenwald's loneliness, a dimension which to my mind informs the poems of this collection more deeply even than the poet's having wandered off into to the world, circa 1969. It is the loneliness of time; specifically of time having passed, of a man, a person, a human being trying to come to terms with the simple fact that life, which once, like that tiny airplane pushing out into the Atlantic, might have been all promise and expectation, is now peopled with useless addresses of friends and acquaintances who no longer are:

... and your book
            with five hundred addresses in the world,
the world outside, which is not
            here with you, the world
where some few people know your name
            though you have no one's name to say

"In the Crowd"

and:

At 6 a.m. you have no friends, not even
in another time zone.
You have a flashlight and a radio and an Icelandic sweater
with holes at the elbows

"That Time of the Night (cbc Radio)"

Since this is meant to be a review rather than a study, and reviewers are meant to complain—at least a little, so they can showcase their own dubious talents, I'll offer two quibbles. First, An Opening includes three small poems which to my mind don't belong in this collection: "You Don't Have to Be Leonard Cohen", and two others which I'll leave to you to stumble upon.

Second, and this is indeed a quibble's quibble, and, strictly, his publisher's rather than Greenwald's responsibility. As a writer it's difficult if not downright painful to ask other writers for endorsements, to ask friends, acquaintances, colleagues to at least skim through your book and cobble together 30 or 40 words that actually say something true about your book and that will entice readers. Greenwald's endorsements duly note "the language, icy and crisp, palpable", the "technical dexterity", "his style ... subtle in rhythm and syntax". All true, certainly, relevant to a poetry collection, certainly, and certainly encouraging, but also not quite fair to the poet, with their suggestions of craft, technique and linguistic prowess. I am indifferent to how a poet arrives at a poem: consciously, subconsciously, accidentally ... I care about the poem, and think, therefore, that Greenwald's publisher might have served him best by following the example of some French and Italian imprints (Folio, Einaudi) by letting the poet's own words speak for him. After all, what endorsement can best:

The women are raising their arms with their viewers
you can see their hands clearly
the wedding bands glint under the quarter-disk of star
they are married married married every last one
of Oslo's office workers
the women, that is, for the men are older balding divorced
these women's husbands work elsewhere for better pay
and have affairs with yet other
office workers, women not out here now
I don't know where they are
I've never figured it out
and that's not the only thing.

"Office Workers Looking at the Sky"

Reviewer Nicola Vulpe's  fifth poetry collection, On the News that Sagittarius A* Grows Hungrier, is scheduled for publication in late 2025.