The threshold of the new

The Threshold of the New, a book twenty-five years in the making, describes Henry Sloss's "exile" to Italy in the early 1970s and his reluctant but increasingly passionate commitment to the terms of life there. An unwilling expatriate, Sloss has lost his job and leaves the United States with his wife and child in the last months of the Vietnam War.

The poems depict a long and sometimes agonizing accommodation to new surroundings by travellers who are not on vacation but are foreigners seeking a home away from home.

With time the travellers settle into a new life, a life among other "latter day expatriates." A second child, a small olive farm, the pleasures of food and drink, of company and travel, define that life, as does the life of art. For it is with the art of Italy and with the artists who have worked there that he must finally come to terms, as he must with the artist in himself. The volume's long, final poem, "An Old World Setting," shows the traveller at home in Umbria and in his art.