Provoked in Venice: The Rider Quintet, Vol. 3

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. (Mar.)