Mark the Music - Softcover

Poetry. The poems of MARK THE MUSIC are by turns serious and comic—often simultaneously—spiritual and skeptical, reflective and boisterous. Their subjects range from "the little / violence lifting their / scarred hands / in one poor truce after another" to the daily acts of inventiveness that are among the bulwarks against chaos. In form, Leffler's poems engage traditional lyric and narrative, fractured syntax, word art, and improvisational riffs. A number of poems draw on the spirit of the Bible and the shape of Talmudic commentary, while others are at play between the boundaries of paraphraseable meaning and abstraction. The heart of the book is bounded by two versions of "What I Want of It," namely Poetry.

Merrill Leffler has published two previous collections of poetry, Partly Pandemonium, Partly Love (Dryad Press, 1982) and Take Hold (Dryad Press, 1997). Originally a physicist-engineer at NASA, he did graduate studies in literature at the University of Maryland and Oxford University, taught literature at the U.S. Naval Academy, went on to become senior science writer at the University of Maryland Sea Grant Program. The publisher of Dryad Press, Leffler has guest-edited issues of various magazines, among them, Poet Lore on Israeli poetry: The Changing Orders and Shirim: The Poetry of Eytan Eytan, which he and Moshe Dor translated from the Hebrew. He is a founder of The Writer's Center (Bethesda, Maryland) and currently writes the "Vox Poetica" column for the Voice newspapers in Maryland.