Robert Kramer is a poet of perception and reflection he observes, he thinks and feels. He makes us notice the margin of our lives, redeems the drabness of the daily, makes the trivial significant, the forgettable unforgettable. Enhancing Kramer's nuanced moods and descriptions is a remarkable precision of imagery. The new boy in the neighborhood slouches and scuffs the black-tarred street with his ragged canvas sneakers. Especially memorable are the lines at the end of a poem. A sudden childhood memory...startles, like the echo of a cough in an empty cathedral. His father remembers the frozen pondwhere girls and boys in brightest sweaterswould skate and sport on the ragged ice, avoiding the driftwood that protruded from the surface, like the clawing hands of drowned hoboes. And in a woman's fantasy A leering sailor in a red-striped under-blouse, tight white bell-bottomed trouserswanders through her Parisian dream and nightmares, a red pompom bobbing on his jaunty slanted cap. Followin