Recurring throughout Ruddy's The Sticks of Inquiry is a return to essential questions that, throughout history, have run the gauntlet of various academic disciplines and are here brought back home to a domestic, everyday application. Man's relationship to his immediate surroundings - his work, his family, the art he appreciates - is explored accessibly through language that reveals observational influences from Frank O'Hara's whimsical pondering to Tu Fu's concrete documenting. Ruddy isn't afraid to ask and, often, indulge the simple questions, making a case for the precise, immediate, and,...
Recurring throughout Ruddy's The Sticks of Inquiry is a return to essential questions that, throughout history, have run the gauntlet of various acade...
In his third collection, Ruddy departs somewhat from the narrative distance characteristic of both Pond and The Sticks of Inquiry and allows his speakers a raw, emotional voice that often sacrifices anything poetic for a pure and immediate response to their subjects. In this bare immediacy, a poetry that is as rooted in Li Po and Frank O'Hara as it is in Bruce Springsteen and Joe Strummer was allowed to breathe. Hurricane Season delves unabashedly into the midlife American experience and leaves it all on the page, sometimes bloody and hoarse, maybe a little road worn, but just as much...
In his third collection, Ruddy departs somewhat from the narrative distance characteristic of both Pond and The Sticks of Inquiry and allows his speak...
