Title: 4 SQUARES DECLARE 5
Author: Mary du Passage
Publisher: The Groundwater Press, Hudson, New York

It is a great pleasure for me to remark upon the luminous coherence of Mary du Passage's poems, which declare themselves with such quiet persistence; firstly, because of the delights to be discovered in their reading, and secondly, because I so clearly remember reading, some fifteen years ago, her first attempts at poetry. She has come, as the phrase will have it, a long way.

Although her poetry is everywhere touched, sometimes suffused, with darkness, her art permits her to proffer this darkness serenely. We see how form, as always, has the last word. In her prose piece, Fin de Siecle, she writes, Yes, I maintain an even temper, always upset about something. I would say that this statement might stand as a rubric for this collection. The poems are somehow chafed and irritated into being; they move, often haltingly, and, as it were, against the poet's better judgment, into recording of loss, disillusionment, anger, and always, the intransigent coldness of the terrible world.

Gilbert Sorrentino