Crossing the Tape

"Michael Salcman is a true polymath: retired brain surgeon, art scholar and critic, salt water sailor and sports fan, and above all a poet of rare distinction. His most recent collection, Crossing the Tape, is just the latest proof of how good he is and how universal are his interests and obsessions. Ekphrastic poems bump up against poems about baseball, about the sad fate of urban areas, about art, about ordinary mortality, and most personally about the horrific murders perpetrated during the Holocaust and other atrocities, as in "The Vanished World of Iryna Abramov," a villanelle set during the Russian invasion of Ukraine: "In Bucha, the flowers grow fat on the graves." This is a collection to be read and read again, and to cherish with each re-reading"--