In Where Sparrows Work Hard, the poet takes the reader on a journey of exploration through the subterranean, labyrinthine, infernal world of the human soul, where everything gives evidence of a cosmic devastation. It is not by chance that in the external world which is at once the setting of the poems and the symbolic analogue of that hell, one finds over and over again the images of ruination and perdition….

This is a profoundly elegiac poetry, in which everything appears condemned to pass away without possibility of ever achieving fruition. The fated abortion of man's being appears illustrated in the repeated depictions of his finiteness: his smallness and fragility vis-a-vis the forces of violence which pervade an essentially hostile universe; his temporal limitation, sentenced as he is to old age and death; his intellectual deficiency, in light of his inability to understand the causes of his very...