Costigan is sequence of fantastic stories, under the aegis of the Great Mother, through the nineteenth-century Levant. Its historical characters include Christopher Costigan and Thomas Molyneux, an Irish priest and an English sailor who died from exposure to the Dead Sea in August; Porfiri Uspenski, a Russian monk sent to examine the affairs of the Greek Church in Palestine; and the ninety-one-year-old philanthropist Moses Montefiore, on his seventh and last journey to Jerusalem.

" Dennis Silk is a delicious poet. Utterly natural, entirely himself, he works by a curious method. What he does, in his easy way, is to surround the inexpressible, which is charmed by his siege and surrenders. It's all very simple."
Saul Bellow