and literary orientation. Concerned with dramatizing essential American values, he began a story in verse called Washington's Night, depicting the psychological, political and military pressures on George Washington in December 1776, and culminating in his victory at the Battle of Trenton on December 26. America, the poem makes clear, stresses not only military power, but the longing for political freedom and especially a fundamental fairness, the justice for which the nation has become famous. He was greatly helped in all this by his second marriage. Beatrice Beebe, whose work in New York City had explored mother-infant communication, and whose psychoanalytic practice had established her firmly in that field, was galvanized, like her husband, by the events of September 11. Her struggle to help the mothers and children who had lost their men that day would prove invaluable to her patients and, in time, to McCrorie. But first, after a ten-year effort assisted by many Greek scholars, notably the late William Wyatt of Brown University, he published a verse translation of Homer's Odyssey with The Johns Hopkins University Press in 2004. In all his translations he persisted with the idea of close approximation: not only the sense but the sound of Homer's Greek he attempted to capture in English verse. Responses to this work were highly favorable; he would soon go on to Homer's Iliad. Before then, the death of his mother prompted a number of poems in McCrorie's next book, published in 2010 by BrickHouse Books and called Gone Games. Childhood play also connects to this title, as do romances that come and go in one's adult life. In the same year McCrorie published his first chapbook, Gretchen, with BrickHouse Books, and his first e-book with Amazon by the same title. For some time he had been working on a story in verse focusing on the life and political vision of Woodrow Wilson. Gretchen Schreiber, a German-American character in this story, suffers exceedingly when the U. S., following Wilson, goes to war with Germany in 1917. Generally Wilson will try to treat Germany fairly at the end of the war, however; indeed, McCrorie's principal aim in the story is to explore the question, How shall America send her best abroad? No President before Wilson had worked so hard trying to embody an answer to this question. His League of Nations was a crowning achievement in Paris, 1919. On September 11,