First collection of Lowry's extensive poetic canon, including most of the Mexican verses related to his novel, Under the Volcano.
"These poems would be worth keeping in print, if for no other reason, for their illuminations of Under the Volcano: 'See mind's petal / torn from a good tree, but where shall it settle / But in the last darkness and at the end?' Sometimes, as the images of "For Under the Volcano," they become 'palm-of-the-hand' versions of that masterpiece. Lowry is a poet of struggle-with life, and with the creative process. Here are his struggle's fruits: guilt, alcoholism, hopeless, self-deriding quest for salvation, which seems to be love, and, above all, self-destruction-but always accomplished with self-knowledge, enriched (in order to further torment itself) with compassion for all the beings that the poet, and us with him, are failing. His words are always sad and often beautiful."-William T. Vollman
