Here Mako draws deeply on various contemporary “makers”: the poets Emily Dickinson and T. S. Eliot (whose Four Quartets Mako has carried about with him for years, as I have often done myself, and that in his case provided his sustenance during the dark days after 9/11), the artists Vincent van Gogh and Mark Rothko. (Towering over them, we come to realize, is the music of J. S. Bach.) Here he converges with the poetry of the Irishman Micheal O’Siadhail, whose book The Five Quintets takes Eliot
