Over the course of a lifetime's worth of beautiful poems, as well as translations from Yiddish that read like beautiful poems in English, Richard Fein has created the song of himself and of his Brooklyn--Jewish world. It is a world preserved in lines that are a marvel of vigilant, always fascinated attention. In its sheer descriptive capacities, his verse is as open to radiant marvels and erotic candor as it is aware of the abrupt horrors of brute historical reality. Fein listens so closely and so deeply to the voices of filial memory that his Hebrew Bible poems speak to us in the same intimate and dramatic idiom as his family poems. This is poetry that in its undeviating focus of selfless attention enlarges our scope of human dignity and responsibility.