The Threshold of the New (James Dickey Contemporary Poetry Series)

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. The story of an unwilling expatriate, Sloss has lost his job and leaves the United States in the last months of the Vietnam War with his wife and child to live abroad. That he and his family might end up living in Italy only dawns on them with time, as they come to realize their growing attachment to the world they find there and their deteriorating relations with the world they left behind.