"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)

"Margo Berdeshevsky is a mature poet and world citizen whose ever-lively sense of wonder both at the world and at language is a constant in her work. This is writing with emotional power, great beauty and immediacy, found in the here-and-now, woven with extraordinary awareness of what is precisely not beautiful in human life, which is an intrinsic part of the poems' texture and reason for being." (MARILYN HACKER.)

[ The book forms a passage through the metaphorical wilderness of my time — in five sections: On Frailty/ Whom Beggars Call/ The Story/ On Breaking/ Best Love ] (mb)