In the World He Created According to His Will: Poems [Paperback]

DAVID CAPLAN is an associate professor of English at Ohio Wesleyan University. His scholarly publications include Questions of Possibility: Contemporary Poetry and Poetic Form and the forthcoming Rhyme’s Challenge. His poems have been featured in journals including the New England Review and the Antioch Review. His work has been translated into several languages, appearing in publications in Belgium, France, Germany, and Kashmir. Caplan serves as a contributing editor to the Virginia Quarterly Review and Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing.

Caplan’s lyrics seek to understand the world in its fullness, both the suffering that history imposes on individual experience and the sacredness that underpins it. This is a meditation on love and faith built out of language as spare and direct as prayer. Some poems deal with issues of statehood and Jewish identity; increasingly the poems grapple with the demands of traditional Jewish practice, moving from a Christianized American landscape to a sequence set in Jerusalem.

Equally attuned to contemporary life and Biblical exigency, In the World He Created According to His Will vividly explores the experience of living in a world marked by terror and joy.

Whether he is retelling the story of Abraham and Isaac, tracing the elegant persistence of the morning glory, or contemplating the web of mixed allegiances in violence-riven Jerusalem, David Caplan writes in light. His economies can take one’s breath away. He settles for nothing less than the world’s most resonant accords. Who else among us so tellingly renders the kinship of learning and prayer (‘both forms of argument’)? Or so patiently traces the links between figure and faith? A beautiful, necessary book.

A marvelous debut collectlóå