music from behind a stone wall

A collection expressing musical experience and daily life through poetry.

The poems in Steven Rood’s newest collection take on a musical sensibility as they flow from the poet’s sixty years as a classical guitarist who remains preoccupied with the tonalities of daily life. Each poem in music from behind a stone wall comes together to build a multi-layered symphony that reveals the delights and travails of family life and moments of intimate connection with animals and plants. At the core of the book are poems considering the overwhelming task of trying to communicate the essence of musical experience via the written word. This is a book of grief and joy sung with lyric acuity, vivid images, and formal variation.

Steven Rood is a practicing trial lawyer and poet living in Berkeley, CA. He is the author of Naming the Wind, also published by Omnidawn. His poems have been published in Periodicities, Sporklet, Quarterly West, Marin Poetry Center Anthology, Fugue, Lyric, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Tar River Poetry, New Letters, Marlboro Review, Atlanta Review, Southern Poetry Review, Notre Dame Review, and elsewhere.