Allen Afterman was born in Los Angeles in 1941. He studied at UCLA and Harvard Law School, and taught law in New Zealand, Australia, and Singapore. In 1972 he retired from teaching and devoted himself to poetry, publishing The Maze Rose (1974) and Purple Adam (1980). In 1980, he immigrated to Israel, where he lived until his death in 1992.
These poems have the quality of turning even the most personal private material into a metaphysical whole. This is almost private religious poetry for our post-religious time. Afterman is one of a kind, a total individualist.
