"the varied topography, complexly grained contours, and abundant resources of Mir's poetic territory"
The following are excerpts from Roberto Márquez's 1994 review of the original edition, published in Voice Literary Supplement/Village Voice:
"The publication . . . of this first book-length anthology of work by the Dominican Republic's internationally acclaimed and locally celebrated National Poet is an event — long anticipated, too long delayed."
"Mir achieves a lyrical synthesis of the most private spaces or emotional registers and the most unequivocally public experiences. His poetry achieves a rare, exceptionally felicitous marriage of poetry and politics, of individual sensibility and the chronicling of quotidian collective drama, the still unfulfilled promise of Latin America, its landscape, peoples, and societies."
"Beyond exposing the brutal realities of the trujillato and the United States's abiding imperial presence, Mir pays tribute to the resilience, unyielding endurance, yearning for release, and periodically stunning audacity of the region's ordinary, slighted citizens. The mood is, unavoidably, elegiac. But the persistent journey of this multitude, and that of the poet toward them, gives rise to a prophetic certainty in the future that accepts neither the resignation of despair nor the calculus of contemptuous raisons d'êtat."
"The translations convey the colloquial pulse and feel, the allusive, melodic reverberations of Mir's exacting expertise. . . ."
