Provoked in Venice: The Rider Quintet, vol. 3 (Wesleyan Poetry Series) - Softcover

Rudman, Mark

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0819563544 ISBN 13: 9780819563545

Publisher: Wesleyan University Press, 1999

Synopsis

In these powerfully conceived and understated poems, Mark Rudman asks how culture is created and shared, and how historical events and figures are known through direct experiences of place. The title Provoked in Venice alludes to the structure of the book, wherein a trip to Italy becomes the catalyst for a meditative view of the convergence of imagination, history, and the 20th-century attempt to recover them both. The narrator enters the maze of Venice like a contemporary Dante guided only by the voice of the "rider"-interlocuter. Rich in allusions to literature, film, and the past, this final volume of the trilogy will engage and sustain all mental travelers.

About this title

About the Author

Poet, essayist, and translator, MARK RUDMAN's recent books include Millennium Hotel (1996), Realm of Unknowing (1995), Rider (1994, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry), all published by Wesleyan, and a translation of Euripides' Daughters of Troy (1998).

Reviews

This last installment of a trilogy (following Rider and Millennium Hotel), and Rudman's fifth collection of poems, is a fast-paced, confident, insistently secular synthesis of autobiography with the chaos of urban life in contemporary Italy. Rudman noticeably maintains the argumentative, dialogic style of the first two volumes, intermingling the voice of the Rider (an ever-present interlocutor resembling his deceased step-father, a rabbi, and his own conscience) with a narrator's alternately defensive and bold responses. His casual, conversational tone, and mix of prose and verse, permit a multitude of stream-of-consciousness remarks on films (real and imaginary--from Bardot to Brecht to Mary Shelley), memories, and jokes, all of which can seem relentlessly insular at times. Several poems based on Horatian odes assume a prophet's mantle in criticizing late-millenium, quick-fix political reform; while other pieces like "Tomahawk" and "Phaeton's Dream: Driving Lessons in the Desert" are over-the-top renderings of personal remembrances and mythological tales. But Rudman reserves most of his poetic energy for the book's dominant theme, Venice, where "everything is swirling" and "what cannot be effaced, erased, or reproduced, is experience." The last two sequences, "Venice: The Return in Winter," are his most extensive and innovative, and most tautly lyrical: "the raft/ where you wait to catch the vaporetto/ began to bob rhythmically,/ and millions of/ bizzarely curious people began to pour/ throughout the maze, this labyrinth, this/ Venice." The allusions Rudman allows himself--to the art of Tintoretto, to Mann, James and Rilke--target a rather cultured set of readers, while his own experience allows a broader perspective on the city--perhaps the next best thing to being there.

Copyright 1998 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0819563544
• ISBN 13: 9780819563545
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 212