"Pieta: Song of the Blessed Virgin " is the culminating volume of a master poet, who has charted his own truth and passage through the thicket of lesser work, of a host of contemporaries with limited pith and vision, venal ambition, a dogged tendency to measure themselves against peers and seldom the truly great. Witness here some sample rejections: "Your work has great power and mounting intensity but takes us further than we care to follow."
"We can't publish this, but I'd like to meet you."
"Your poem 'The Hitler Sonata'] would seep through the adjacent pages of our magazine and set fire to them."
"Your work is too ambitious for our purposes."
"Peaks and valleys merge; the mind feels blitzed."
"I question that you'd dedicate this poem to a human being, let alone a woman."
"I must reject this. My question to myself is whether I would have dared publish this even if it were Milton's."
"We do not publish poetry in response to 'Still Falls the Rain, ' a novel]."
The full scope of this poet cannot easily be assessed, for he has spent 34 years not simply healing himself through his work but surviving he is 68] as well. Aside from abundant skill, his paramount strength is an ability to stare directly into what most of us avoid at all cost, the very dark, the cauldron of existence. There are few, perhaps none, like him. Should they exist, they "also stand and wait." In the end, should the English language hold, time will assuredly be on their side. If there is greatness, it is, in fact, patience before the Fact.