My first thought upon discovering this book was, 'Where is Kaplan in the pantheon of great contemporary poets?' For in this little-known work lies a powerful and substantive evocation. Though he compiled these poems in 1973, this former Columbia University professor speaks to subjects which still haunt mankind today, including the many unresolved aspects of our nuclear age. In addition, his descriptions of human pain and need are eloquent, reminding us that such things are a force older than language itself. Closing the aesthetic distance between the writer and the reader, Kaplan speaks to those secret things we all experience in our shared human inheritance yet rarely speak about, except to the closest of friends: waking in the middle of the night with the an unusually intense feeling of the absence of a loved one, or the joys of watching our children in their innocent slumber. Let the 'New York School' of poets and their facile blubbering disappear...we need more poets of substance like Kaplan. As Wallace Stevens' one wrote, poetry is both a cure and a redemption. I thank this obscure English professor for offering us both!