In The Opening Ritual, G. C. Waldrep contends with the failure of the body, the irreducible body, in the light of faith. What can or should "healing" mean when it can't ever mean "wholeness" again? And what kind of architecture is "mercy" when we live inside damage? These are poems that take both the material and the spiritual seriously, that cast their unsparing glances toward "All that is not / & could never be a parable."

The collection concludes with a sequence of truly grand meditations on spiritual consciousness--in one the poet notes how, in the stillness of contemplation, the world begins to hum and resound with music. The Opening Ritual attends to and fashions its song from that music.