Jan Dyroff, poet, lives in Boston, Massachusetts and is a past recipient of the Boston University Alumni Poetry Competition's top prize. "The Poems of Rufinos from the Greek Anthology" (1973, Borealis) and "Journies and Shows" (1974, Borealis) are among his titles. Dyroff also has a passion for coins -- he is a contributor to the "Standard Catalogue of World Coins."

Rufinos, or Rufinus, was a Greek poet with a Latin Name. He was an Ionian of the second century before Christ and the author of a collection of amatory verses. Little beyond these bleak facts is known about his life. Rufinos, though concerned with the human situation (comedy?), was not a significant social commentator. He, rather, tends to make statements which the reader comes to realize are true - and to accept them as "eternal verities" restated without falling into triteness. Rufinos, in many ways, is a poet of the status quo, working within the confines of a given societal and artistic tradition. He does not, in a larger sense, seek or chronicle great changes in the world. Instead, and with a chortle one suspects, he concerns himself with alterations in his own life, fortune and loves - and takes these, rightly or wrongly, as a measure for all mankind. from the introduction by Jan Michael Dyroff