In Times Of Danger

Paul Oppenheimer's fourth collection of poems presents a love story told almost entirely in brisk, often racy modern sonnets and set against a background of the rural Hudson Valley and New York City-before, during and after the catastrophe of 9/11. "I need a form that I did not invent," he writes, "tuned by ancient anguish to impart/the strain of modern doubt: an instrument/just right, just now, on which to test my heart." His test turns into a struggle that sweeps up history, elusive love itself, preparations for war and the war in Iraq in more than ninety eerily redemptive, shocking and accomplished renderings of poetry's oldest and still most powerful form.

"Lyrical, witty, extravagant and precise, the poems in Paul Oppenheimer's new collection limn the paradoxes of post-millennial urban life in a voice which, while profoundly informed by an indelible plethora of past poetries, is entirely contemporary. Oppenheimer is (incidentally) a master of the sonnet form in all its variations, and these poems, in addition to their other pleasures, allow the reader to eavesdrop on his ongoing colloquy with Donne, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Ronsard, Keats and Yeats. Love, politics and ethics are some of his themes, but he is above all a poet of New York City, caparisoned in the raiment of all its seasons, in its present state of risk, paradox and plenitude."
Marilyn Hacker, National Book Award Winner for Poetry

"Streaming through the counterpoint of Paul Oppenheimer's powerful collection In Times of Danger, in his daringly moving sonnets, is beauty-physical and metaphysical. It is woven into an unexpected music of paradox and wit; sophistication and vulnerability; urgency of heart and formidable wisdom; the urban, specifically New York City, and the pastoral. Most stunningly, there is the courage that binds all of these, examining-with rare depth-self and society, the meeting of personal and political. Here is poetry enacting a prelapsarian faith that is never na?ve, but hopeful while aware of how deeply we have fallen as the events and actions leading to the Iraqi war unfold. 'I never doubt the seven seas in us, ' writes Oppenheimer, replenishng the difficult genre of the love poem against a tragic backdrop, demonstrating with freshness the relevance of the sonnet, and its capacity to express great passion."
Yerra Sugarman, winner PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry