SOURCE: "The Rings of Saturn by Diane Wakoski," in Los Angeles Times Book Review, October 16, 1986, p. 14.

In the following review, Prado affirms Wakoski's collection The Rings of Saturn and speaks of the poet's bitterness, curiosity, and her ability to transform elements of her life into accomplished poetry.

Diane Wakoski's latest book of poems is filled with landscapes; people, both friends and grotesques; and questions: She exists, in her writing, in a world fed by outer reality but not convinced by it. She's curious—and bitter; the bitterness is redeemed by the curiosity. Fearing decay, ignorance, and the inevitability of death, Wakoski writes with the intensity of someone fiercely alive, who still wants to unscramble failures, loneliness, the image of herself as the homely girl who was never acceptable. In describing a search for her own landscape, she says, "This icy planet / where I have banished myself. / This icy...