“I picked this one up expecting a plain climbing memoir. I got something stranger, something better. Goldman distilled a lawyer’s lifetime of summits into 148 poems. They read like journal entries written at 14,000 feet, with numb fingers and a full heart.”
Alan V. Goldman practiced law for decades. He climbed on the side—or the other way around. The book never decides. That tension is part of its charm. This is the fifth edition, expanded and re-expanded since the first printing. Goldman keeps returning to this book. He returned to the mountains the same way. What struck me most is how much ground he covers, literally and otherwise. “The Power of Now,” tucked into the Flow section, boils climbing down to a few plainspoken lines. No past, no future, just the next foothold. This idea shows up in every meditation app. Here it’s earned the hard way: one step at a time, up a mountain. There’s “Red Snow,” from the Special Conditions section. It stopped me cold. Goldman and his party find pink-tinged snow high on a peak. They assume the worst. They’re wrong. The snow holds Chlamydomonas nivalis, a single-celled alga. It goes dormant and red in the cold. It blooms green again in summer. Goldman turns a science fact into a meditation on dormancy and renewal. It’s one of the most moving passages in the book. “The Moment of Decision” delivers nerve. Goldman describes an unroped scramble across a crumbling gap in a summit ridge. He travels “like a disk,” daring the mountain to do its worst. You feel the exposure in your stomach. “The Freedom of the Hills” anchors the Quest section. It does something I didn’t expect from a poem. It argues, in three parts, for what freedom means to a climber: political, physical, psychological. It reads like Goldman thinking out loud, working through an idea he’s spent years turning over on rock. Goldman writes like a man who has spent time in courtrooms and above the tree line. He brings both instincts to the page: the climber’s eye for detail, the lawyer’s patience for building an argument point by point. That combination gives the collection its flavor. Readers who want compact, imagistic poetry will find some pieces sprawling. Goldman follows a thought to its conclusion, footnotes and all. Stick with a poem past its first stanza. It opens into something you didn’t expect, the way a switchback trail hides the next view until you round the bend. If you’ve wondered what goes through a person’s mind between one foothold and the next, hand this book to them. It’s sincere, specific, and full of real mountains.
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