Samuel Menashe, New York Poet of Short Verse, Dies at 85

The cause was complications of heart disease, Nicholas Birns, a literary critic and friend, said.

Mr. Menashe (pronounced men-AHSH) specialized in very short, often unpunctuated poems of less than 10 lines, with a religious or metaphysical bent. The British scholar P. N. Furbank called them “perfect little mechanisms, minute cathedrals.”