The Book, Behind the Dune is a long unitary poem about the birth of a poetic consciousness and its development in a world marked by the discovery of beauty, eroticism and the reality of evil. Influenced by St. Augustine, The Cloud of Unknowing and Wordsworth's The Prelude, the poem, full of literary, artistic and philosophical references, is simultaneously a meditation on the meaning of time and its manifestations--its epiph-anies--in a concrete life. The reflection on historical time leads the poet to the reality of "the pain of the world," but also towards a...