Big, thoughtful and full of inherited stories from Ovidian myths to 1960s movies, Rudman's remarkable seventh book of poems focuses on eros, romance and memory. Rudman, who won the National Book Critics Circle award for Rider
(1994), has returned over and over since to scenes and elements of his own life; several poems here paint scenes from an uneven, depressed, middle-class childhood in Utah, punctuated by hopeful visits to L.A. This book's long, multi-part poems often feature confessional speculation and storytelling (in Roman type) interrupted or provoked by a questioner in italics: sometimes the questioner sounds like a psychoanalyst, though he can also represent the poet's late father, or (perhaps) the stepfather who served in L. A. as "Rabbi to the stars." Rudman tends to mix strikingly resonant declarations with journalistically flat lines: "Invisible demons love to ambush the reformed.// Who would have imagined that Ricky Nelson/ Would die before Dean Martin?" His longer poems can disappoint, especially when they offer detail after confessional detail; some seem derivative of the work of Frank Bidart. When Rudman finds the archetypes these images seem to seek, however, his language achieves as much drama as any reader could wish. His long poem about Perseus and Andromeda matches almost anything else in the recent spate of adaptations of Ovid, while the late short poem "Money" achieves a wrenching simplicity, finding an unlikely menace (and a protest of sorts) in a Christmas card. (Dec.)
