The Muse Is Always Half-Dressed in New Orleans: And Other Essays

These essays by the sharp and ingratiating Codrescu ( Road Scholar ) rove all over the place, and readers should be ready to do likewise. The author, a Transylvanian-born poet, a longtime resident of the U.S. and a commentator for National Public Radio, takes up subjects just as incongruously diverse as himself in his 26th book. As his fans will be glad to find, Codrescu stays in character: he is passionate, informal, maverick and ragingly funny, unwilling to behave. ``All the right-wingers have whiskers,'' he mutters sotto voce in ``Black Water'' about the Russian film director Yuri Mamin and his movie The Fountain. And in ``A Kind of Love,'' Codrescu considers the muse of baseball. ``There is some evidence,'' he offers mischievously, ``that baseball was brought to America by Romanians. Transylvanian shepherds play a primitive form of stickball called oina that resembles baseball.'' The title piece, a chuckling love song to his home port, praises Dixie's Voodoo Blackened Beer, the city's above-ground Lafayette Cemetery, fig trees that flourish in the tropical heat, and stories that do, too. (July)