Belitt likes unusual words, and [in Nowhere But Light gives] them a remarkable rightness of context….

Belitt's closely packed images and echoes, together with predominantly anapestic rhythms, draw me deep into the body of a poem before much of its prose sense is clear: I come to know the poems from the inside out….

Belitt's rhythms carry me swiftly onward, as if my sensibility were being bounced like a billiard ball among the clusters of echoes, until it comes to rest on the apparent simplicity of "time is made human again."…

Belitt develops ideas about the serenity to be salvaged from a precarious life; in the first section of his book, he veers between Vermont and Mexico, and comes to see himself as an "antipodal man": a figure teetering through disparate worlds, walking on the footsoles of his mirror-image, or of his other self.

This figure conjures up risk as a fact of life and of poetry. How to live with such risks is dealt with at length in "The Gorge," a five-part work arising from the poet's sojourns in Cuernavaca, where people have learned to live on nearly vertical slopes. Like those people, this poem is precariously, masterfully balanced: Belitt combines dense texture with openness of form, and he handles a wide variety of tones. Serenity comes with acceptance of hazard….

This paradoxical joy can transform even barrenness and death. That is the subject of "The Orphaning."… The section itself takes its title from the second part of the poem, "A Gift of Light"; the gift turns out to be reciprocal, for the poem is illumination offered in return for earlier gifts. "Time is made human again," and the losses and gains of the spirit are celebrated with power and dignity. (p. 122)