Facing the Music

Music in Bruce Berger's poetry is more than subject matter, more than cadence; it is a metaphor for the examined life. In these poems, a man's transformations are measured by the concerts he has witnessed; the depth of a woman's life is revealed by an unfinished painting her son attempts to complete; a composer is gauged by his silences. Berger springs secrets from our uninspected common places. With a compression rare in contemporary poetry, and a leavening wit, he draws the reader toward a subject's interior through its beguiling surface.