PAPER AIRPLANE

Kaplan is a transient through the middle ranges of emotion, one of the ""pebble-droppers at the still lakes"" whose easy-come, easy-gone observations flow by like the scenery outside a Greyhound window. Many of these poems are literally notes in passing, from trains and planes and strange hotel rooms, written with casually undemanding attention and always adding a personal gloss -- his girlfriend's ""showgirly"" legs, the wife and son he suddenly regrets having let go, or simply the sun coming again to his bedroom window. There are hijinks and momentary lows, but no urgency really in the mild, free, somewhat disingenuous phrases. Kaplan recognizes himself as the creature of movie matinees and college literature courses -- an ""educated eccentric"" susceptible to small delights but perhaps embarrassed by great woes. He is doomed to see a teat as ""the finger of Jose Ferret pointed at the perjurers/ in the Emile Zola Story"" and to wonder how ""would Paul Valery or Paul Verlaine view those cathedral windows?"" It's a special sensibility and he'll speak directly to those who share it. pleasantly enough to others.