It Depends

Book excerpt: This book appeared in Italy during the Nobel laureate's eighty-second year. The sardonic force of his shrewd observations of the contemporary scene remains unblunted even as the poet has become more involved with everyday, more private, more self-revealing. Here it gains even greater prominence as the poet attempts to find catchholds and constancies in an unstable world, finally to accede to 'precariousness the muse of our time.'