In the World He Created According to His Will

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.