Azrael on the Mountain
Poems by Victor Depta

Except from back cover

Book Review

The Iconoclast
Number 74
Phil Wagner, Editor/Publisher
1675 Amazon Road
Mohegan Lake, NY 10547-1804

"Under the indifferent eye of the death angel, King Coal, the West Virginians depicted in this collection cope with floods, illness (physical and mental), poverty and pollution.  Giant cranes behead mountains.  Behemoth trucks thunder down narrow roads; the mythic Hindu juggernaut comes alive.  Strip mining is the new paradigm in a consumer society in love with giant economies of scale.  Like charity and love, economic exploitation begins at home.

These aren't poems so much as character studies, carefully painted miniatures, cameos.  They are the voices of the voiceless.  Plain sense and plain craziness.  If this were a novel, the landscape would be the main character:  the plot, what it does to the people--and what the people do to it.

Mr. Depta has written a really fine book (and it couldn't have been easy to get right--and real).  Few people writing are as equally at home with plain folk talk/wisdom, nature and classical allusions.  I hope this book gets the attention it deserves."