[Unborn Things: South American Poems is Patrick Lane's] threnodies of the Inca past and his appalled presentations of the here-and-now in which the descendants of those who created the Andean civilizations survive. Patrick Lane's earlier poems have already shown his exceptional quality as a poet recording with mingled delight and anger the splendour of the world and the shame of what man has done to it and to his fellow inhabitants…. [The main suite of Unborn Things, "Macchu Picchu",] evokes the past of that lost final fortress of the Inca realm, perched on its splendid crags above the jungle and the river: the departure of Manco Capac, the last Inca, to die in a Spanish ambush; the dying out of the deserted Virgins of the Sun; and the fate their refuge now shares with other tragic loci of history, with Mycenae and Elsinore, with Taxila and Persepolis…. (p...