The Millennium Hotel: The Rider Quintet, vol. 2 (Wesleyan Poetry Series) [Hardcover]

Mark Rudman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 20, 1996 | Series: Wesleyan Poetry Series

In this captivating sequel to his award-winning Rider, Mark Rudman reclaims a sacred space for poetry. The Millennium Hotel is a world of dazzling imitations, a vast casino where personal narrative is recognized as a fiction and death always holds the winning hand. Rudman asks, "How not to be seduced by the new?" as he illustrates the intimate ways in which facade, gender, and memory inform both our private and public realms.

Here the interlocutor's voice shifts and freely crosses gender lines, especially in poems about early erotic experience. Mothers, daughters, lovers, and wives are passionately engaged. Its inclusiveness and wide range of tonal registers enable The Millennium Hotel to blend seamlessly the intimate, the social, the comic, and the apocalyptic. The book moves like a series of sonatas, melding childhood, the diaspora, and eros.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

It is refreshing to encounter work with none of the anxieties of making connections, that all-too-common desire to have the shorter poem cohere. Rudman has found a way of writing from the everyday with all its "unpoetic" contingencies and does good work toward making it intelligible. Through the trajectory of the entire book, which is both one and many "poems," we get to know the subject, Rudman the poet, and his city, New York-without which it is impossible to imagine this vivid and arresting work. "It never stops being odd/ being snowed in/ in a big city." And why the Millennium (a 2000-room monolith in lower Manhattan)? Because "it's the only hotel I could find on no notice to escape with a pool/ and circuitous skies, reviving to impossible/ blue-grey-gold,/ through which the reddish brick can be itself again." It is a subject, like all of us, perpetually adrift on the backstreets of memory, in constant pursuit of higher ground, of relief.
Steven R. Ellis, Pennsylvania State Univ. Libs., Univ. Park
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

"The Millennium Hotel enlarges upon the themes that appeared in Rider and includes several of the same players and personae. The books build upon each other to create an increasingly rich linguistic world. Rudman is writing a sophisticated poetry of polyphonic voices. He engages the questions of the subject position and the construction of the self obliquely, in poems that 'think on their feet.' (Alice Fulton ) --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 201 pages
• Publisher: Wesleyan (September 20, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0819522295
• ISBN-13: 978-0819522290
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 5.8 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #10,963,905 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Must, March 19, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: The Millennium Hotel: The Rider Quintet, vol. 2 (Wesleyan Poetry Series) (Paperback)

Again, a must; Mark Rudman continues to write some of the most daring poems today. The juxtaposition of prose with verse forces the reader to ask how poetry should be read--what constitutes a line of poetry? The lyrical beauty inherent in the poems included in the second installment of Rudman's anthology defies any simple answer, and makes for a compelling read.