SOURCE: “Coming Through,” in The Canadian Forum, Vol. LXIV, No. 745, January, 1985, pp. 32-4.

In the following laudatory evaluation of Secular Love, Solecki describes the collection as “the ruthless and unembarrassed engagement with the self,” adding “Almost every page shows evidence of Ondaajte's brilliant visual imagination and his auditory sensitivity to the musical possibilities of free verse.”

Although we don't usually think of it in this way, poetry, like life, has its historically significant dates: 1798, the first Lyrical Ballads; 1857, Les Fleurs du Mal; and 1922, The Waste Land are for us not just dates of publication but also demarcation points indicating that after that particular moment our conception of poetry changed and our view of human sensibility subtly altered. In our own time, perhaps the most significant year for many was 1959, which saw the appearance of Robert Lowell's Life Studies, a sequence of intensely personal poems and prose pieces dealing...