Perhaps no poet of so scant acknowledgement in his lifetime and so little actual poetry has been so well served in the mere six years since his death as Lucio Piccolo with the appearance of his Collected Poems…. (p. 194)

Piccolo's poems … show time suspended, static, being held onto and re-evoked in resonances and touches—l'ore sospese, l'ombre dei giorni—these figures of time and substances held indefinitely in consciousness recur and recur. But everything about Piccolo is strange, mysterious, improbable, full of the turns and twists of chance. And irony. (pp. 195-96)

Piccolo's poetry carries the weight of … melancholy, [of] austerity of sentiment, [of the] seedy magnificence which is Sicily. (p. 200)

But still the Mediterranean sun shines through the poetry of the recluse. And in this constant counterpart of sun and night, light and dark, there is omnipresent the eternal Sicilian theme. Piccolo's poetry is full of the...