Book description
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. "This last
installment of a trilogy, 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 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.'...His own experience allows a boarder
perspective on the city-perhaps the next best thing to being
there."--Publishers Weekly 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).
