ONIONS AND ROSES

A raw, painfully disciplined awareness haunts these poems which veer between a despairing world ""where God Himself is only the solution to a thorny equation"" and one of profound faith and between a bleak existence tenanted only by a dog and unhappy memories to one full of touching human beings and fine landscapes. The central loneliness at the core of these conflicts is not self-pitying, but appealing in the strength with which it faces, analyzes, questions its varying predicaments as well as those of other loners (an aunt, a dead cleaning woman, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, etc.). An intensely human and humanistic perspective.