Costigan is sequence of fantastic stories, under the aegis of the Great Mother, through the nineteenth-century Levant. Its historical characters include Christopher Costigan and Thomas Molyneux, an Irish priest and an English sailor who died from exposure to the Dead Sea in August; Porfiri Uspenski, a Russian monk sent to examine the affairs of the Greek Church in Palestine; and the ninety-one-year-old philanthropist Moses Montefiore, on his seventh and last journey to Jerusalem.

” Dennis Silk is a delicious poet. Utterly natural, entirely himself, he works by a curious method. What he does, in his easy way, is to surround the inexpressible, which is charmed by his siege and surrenders. It’s all very simple.”

Saul Bellow

This book will be reissued by Wesleyan University Press soon.