Gaspar is a surgeon, a poet, and a writer of scientific and lyric prose in addition to a translator of Spinoza, Rilke, Seferis and others. Earth Absolute, edited and translated by Mary Ann Caws and Nancy Kline, contains abundant evidence of Gaspar's gifts: an autobiographical essay, a reflection on scientific and medical matters, and poems from diverse periods and places. Earth Absolute, the book's central text, is Gaspar's long love poem to "the naked song of the Judean mountains," which, he tells us, revealed itself to his "thirst on the pathways of Rock-strewn Arabia, desolate and blessed." The breadth and scope of his poetics is evident in the text's diversity, too, a complex synthesis of science, ancient history, medicine, geology, religion, archeology, linguistics, botany and more.
