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. Vollmann