“(This first book) is an extraordinary mixture of emotional power and beauty. It's not like anything else I have read lately or in the past. So MUCH verbal beauty, out of the here-and-now, woven with an extraordinary openness to what is precisely NOT beautiful in human life, making that an intrinsic part of the poem's texture”—Marilyn Hacker
“There is in Margo Berdeshevsky’s work a rare persistence of the lyric voice, used with a sense of ecstasy & grief almost religious in its evocations. Absolutely modern & fearlessly romantic by turns, the poems circle the rich & threatened corners of the living planet & travel further into places marked by mythic & oneiric time. With the publication of But a Passage in Wilderness, Berdeshevsky emerges, fully empowered, as the maker of a new poetry that pushes voice & image toward creation of a world “barbaric, vast and wild” that Diderot once saw as marker of what all poetry must be.”—Jerome Rothenberg
“What makes But a Passage in Wilderness a unity, a big book and a small cosmos, is the depth of feeling it conveys, abundant and interactive, embodied and sensual. The poems are unfailingly fluent with emotional understanding, accurately invoked. A faithful dailyness radiates her words, even in her most daring flights. “Mother-ground,” she says, “show me roots in your bare dirty kiss.” She has taken her store of our language to heart.”—Marie Ponsot
