Amapolas y cardos: 1963-2004 se presenta a los lectores con características que encontramos en algunos de los clásicos del siglo xx. Es una poesía que se construye a partir de los elementos (a lo Neruda), absoluta cuando se apoya en la solidez de la nominalizaciones (omo la querìa Jorge Guillén), relativa cuando es atravesada por las posiciones personales y/o ideológicas del sujeto poético que toma cuerpo en sus versos.

El poemario es particularmente sorprendente y bienvenido cuando lo leemos como una colección de viñietas, de posadas de un viaje que, por personal y distanciado temporalmente, se convierte en mental.

Amapolas y cardos: 1963-2004 salutes its readers with many of the characteristics we find in the classics of both the Spanish and Latin American poetic tradition of the 20th century. The book establishes a dialogue with Neruda's "poetry of elements," and with "absolute poetry" in the solidness of it nominalizations, as Jorge Guillén wanted. The collection enters the realm of "relative poetry" when it is crossed by the personal and/or ideological positions of the poetic subject as he comes into being in the verses of the book.

The book is particularly interesting and welcome when read as a set of vignettes or rest stops on a journey which, because it is both subjective and located in a distant past, becomes a mental voyage.

Tienen estos poemas un aire inconfundible y una fuerza emotiva bien perfilada que delinean claramente la realidad vivencial de durante más de una década del poeta viajero por tierras de España. La poesía canta profundamente al alma inmersa en las peculiaridades que repercuten por setos andares. El paisaje, la gente, la comida y las circunstancias firman y documentan la vida vivida de este caminante, poeta, que vive, se deleita, comparte y glorifica lo visto y vivido. ¡En hora buena al poeta y sus poemas!

Armed with his powerful language, keen powers of observation and erudite knowledge of Spanish history, art and literature, Justin Vitiello takes for us a tour de force through a land he hardly recognizes at the end of the XXth Century. Like a modern day Ulysses Vitiello returns home to Spain where along the words of Manrique, Machado and Lorca, he finds himself reflected in the creative act like Velázquez in his own Meninas.

Vitiello's sketches of Spain are painted with a brush of sensuality that draws upon imagery from sources as fascinating and diverse as nature, gastronomy, Christian iconography. His fierce honesty emerges in his unflinching gaze at the paradoxes of history and ideology, especially in the images that evoke the Moorish Spain of Al-Andalus and the gruesome tortures of the Inquisition.

It is in the precise intersection of these domains of life that the relentless imagination of Justin Vitiello is at its best. Drawing upon the breadth and depth of his knowledge, Vitiello evokes a night in Algeciras with the hybrid cultural history of that decadent and thriving port town, an encounter with a wary but generous nun, and glimpse of the self-conscious reverse voyeurism of Velázquez.

Justin Vitiello's new book of poems, poppies and thistles, is full of brilliant imagery, arresting turns of phrase, and startlingly original word combinations that juxtapose the astute observations of an American Odysseus traversing Spain and Portugal in the 1960s and again in the 1990s. Whether writing about painful realities or rare beauties, Goya or Velázquez, cante jondo skies of varicose veins, Vitiello is always penetratingly observant, unswervingly truthful, and deeply and decently human.

I haven't read originality of language like this in many years. It's also so "classy." When I come across such unity, I go right back to fiction, where I belong. You, sir, are a poet. A major one in this collection via use of language used in new ways plus new rhythmic arrangements of your "new" language.