Entering the Mountain

Book excerpt: In choosing Peter Fortunato for a Pablo Neruda Award, Stanley Kunitz told the author, "You've discovered your legend. Now where will it take you?" Entering the Mountain is the result. "These poems brilliantly meld personal history, myth, and the heart's irrefutable music. The great poem, 'Every Wizard, ' like so much in this fine collection, is not only a testimony to history--his father's complicated immigrant experience--but to how each of us must honor the weight of love. We can celebrate Art, craft, and the intricacies of how a poem makes us feel, but Fortunato, like a seer, reminds us of the mind's irrepressible provender and the heart's irreducible calculus." --Kenneth A. McClane "The first thing we notice about the poetry of Peter Fortunato is the strength of voice as he delves into memories of family and kinship, and a cultural heritage going back to Italy and even classical Greece. An important theme in Entering the Mountain is performance, performance of music, of magic, escape artistry, the performance of rituals and celebrations of both the living and the dead, acts of homage and affection in our daily lives." --Robert Morgan "[These poems] walk the reader into a world that is full of mystery yet grounded in the poet's commitment to seeing and recording the natural world and his place in it, inviting us to be part of his magician's story." --Bertha Rogers