If readers, confronting the verses now assembled in this appealing book [Collected Poems of Lucio Piccolo] are a little troubled about "placing" Piccolo's verse, they may console themselves with the thought that they are in good company, for Montale [author of the volume's "Afterword"] was somewhat uncertain as to the masters Piccolo may have learned from, groping among such native names as D'Annunzio, Campana and Pea, pondering such possible foreign paternities as Yeats and Hopkins. To this company Leonardo Sciascia, a shrewd critic, adds Jorge Guillén. Had I the temerity to intrude my own impression, I would say that, reading Piccolo's lines, I am occasionally reminded of the sensitive lyrics of Giuseppe Villaroel, yet another Sicilian (and roughly contemporary), all but forgotten since his death in 1956. (pp. 228-29)

Piccolo is not always easy to understand … but I think, in substance, what we find in his verses is a contemplation of nature, richly embellished by personal association, observed religiously but with some skepticism, seen at once as unstable and eternal. Piccolo does not indulge to any great extent in the study of his fellow man, he has no "social message," nor does he (or so it seems to me) contemplate, save obliquely, his own Angst (wherein he differs from the hermetics). His report on what he sees is voiced in musical and artful cadences, in metrical and rhythmic patterns that can hardly be called revolutionary yet subtly vary from the conventional. In his letter to Montale … he said: "I want to speak of the world of baroque churches and old monasteries and of the persons who fit in with those places and have disappeared without leaving a trace. I have attempted not so much to call back this world as to interpret it on the basis of childhood memories." Hence he calls his lyrics "baroque" but he knew, I am sure, that the word has connotations beyond the architectural; it signifies ornament, restlessness, exuberance, other-wordliness, and, I think, also an all but arrogant elegance. Risking the histrionic, baroque reaches for the mystical. (p. 229)

Piccolo's music is highly original, full of seductive cadences, punctuated by rhymes—sometimes all but thrust on the reader, sometimes elusive and even furtive—and by tenuous echoes and assonances…. This somewhat self-conscious virtuosity has its dangers … and I confess that a few of the longer pieces seem to me a little over-elaborated and inflated. Perhaps a graver limitation is a kind of aloof solipsism that emerges from a reading of the poems…. Aside from "Sirocco" and "La meridiana" ("The sundial"), which are surely destined to find their places in anthologies of the future, this … book contains many lines that will delight and eventually haunt the reader. (p. 230)