The jazz term "riff" is short for "riffle"-"make rough." In Untam'd Wing: Riffs on Romantic Poetry, scholar/poet Jeffrey Robinson sets out much like a jazz musician to renew a great body of work (say, Miles Davis on George Gershwin)-"to recast," as he says in the Prefatory Note, "what have become monuments, with all the inertness of passive appreciation that monumentality encourages, into living forms." If he "roughs up" some of our long-time favorites, it's not to revise, and certainly not to improve, but on the contrary to reveal a timeless dimension that is of the very nature of the Romantic: "I would define a 'romantic' poem, of whatever vintage, as one that invites its own renewal in every present." With all the boldness and subtle care of the poets he celebrates, Robinson stakes his "life-long involvement as reader, teacher, and scholar/critic of Romantic poetry" on an equally committed "absorption and belief in the discoveries of modern and contemporary experimental poetry." Like a true marriage it lays bare both parties.