"Merini, like Dante, represents the story of the Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt, in its literal and allegorical senses. The forty poems of The Holy Land recall Moses at Mount Sinai, the Israelites' forty years in the desert, and Jesus' fast in the wilderness.

For Merini, it seems, the Holy Land is not the Promised Land of Canaan, but the forty years spent getting there, coming to terms with the terrifying atrocities of hell, the mystical ecstasies of paradise, and the "intense pain...of plunging back into the banality of daily living." Merini's wandering may be understood as the poet's search for the obscure laws which govern her visions, metamorphoses, and creations."--BOOK JACKET.