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.