Before we praise Piccolo the Sicilian poet, we ought to praise Piccolo the poetic Sicilian. However much we talk of the universality of art, an intense regionalism has never yet been a diminishing factor in literature, though a great regional writer will, in the paradox of art, exalt the province that has chosen him as its voice into a great metaphor of universal experience. A visitor to Faulkner's Mississippi or Joyce's Dublin has been schooled to an intense awareness of and relish in the qualities that make those regions what they are, but those qualities are sharpened, by the magic of literature, into archetypes or symbols of a validity that transcends time and space. In Piccolo's poems we meet a Sicily latent in the country of the tourist guides and the history books, but it was Piccolo far more than, say, Lampedusa who was destined to draw out...