363 pages of poems selected from David Ray's fifteen earlier books and including a section of previously uncollected poems.

       "In this ample selection, poem after poem is a truly fresh occasion, and some of that variety is owing, I think, to an admirable honesty and recklessness of feeling.  If I were to name my favorites in this excellent book, I would start with 'Hansel and Gretel Return,' and the list would be very long.  'Readable" is a term of praise commonly reserved for novels, but anyone who picks up Music of Time will find it blessedly so."
                                                                   -- Richard Wilbur

"If David Ray's most recent book, Music of Time: Selected and New Poems, were a piece of music, it might be Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings -- an exceedingly lovely, undeniably sad work.  These poems stretch back over a long career; consequently there is much life experience imbedded in their lines...
"Ray's poetry can be tender, but it can also be tough. His anti-war poems -- and there are many, chronicling several decades of wars -- rank among the book's most impressive offerings.  Among the poet's strengths are his highly developed sense of empathy and his moral responsiveness...
"Sometimes the simplest, most spare message is the most powerful, as the last two couplets from 'Boomerangs" demonstrate:
    Who ever succeeded in throwing
    out a boomerang called war
    and getting hit in the head
    by a blessing called peace?"
                              -- Kathleen Johnson, The Kansas City Star, 3/4/07