Mark on the Line is centred on the grief author Larry Hopperton endured - endures - in the aftermath of the devastating 1984 loss of the sailing ship Marques, a vessel whose doomed souls he knew intimately, having lived on board with them a few years earlier. Readers of Hopperton's previous work will recognize here his strong affinity for the sea, but here the sea is front and center in all her ambiguity as nurturer and killer, lover and destroyer. That finicky duality is where Hopperton is most at home as a poet, and these poems - many of them worked over for decades - leave no doubt as to his ability as a craftsman of the highest order.