There is a fresh candor and a new ease of utterance in this fifth volume of poems by the Dominican writer Paul Murray. What most immediately impresses, in lyric after lyric, are the moments of quiet epiphany. But such moments of vision have not been easily achieved. Throughout the work, rather than avoid the "torn" and wounded areas of our lives, a range of feelings and experiences--unnamed, invading, threatening, desired--are courageously explored. In the end, the vision, the spiritual awareness that is attained, is the more persuasive and convincing for having first been tested.
