Sundays on the Phone, by Mark Rudman. Wesleyan, November 2005. $22.95
Since 1994 when he published Rider, Mark Rudman has been writing poems that have become something like one long poem, a meditation on an American life, his own. These poems do not constitute a memoir much less an autobiography; they are not a connected narrative, they do not seek to recapture the past. They are meditations on what can be neither resolved nor forgotten; reading them is like watching Jacob wrestle with the angel.
In the recently published Sundays on the Phone, the angel with whom the poet wrestles is the love of a son for his mother. The mother is seen at distinct moments of an unhappy life—as an attractive woman waiting out a divorce in Las Vegas, as a frustrated elderly woman living alone where she doesn't want to be, bitter about her lack of a college education, bewildered by her unhappy marriages, puzzled by her son. "She had no one with whom to share her experience. No friends who loved the things she loved . . ."
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