Poetry. 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.