In East of the City the themes are almost the same as those that preoccupied [Mr. Louis Dudek in Unit of Five]. Mr. Dudek is sensitive to the surfaces of things and of persons, and many of his best passages are the records of his simple responses to what he sees and hears. He is also concerned with the social system, and bent upon its reconstruction: he often bursts into indictments of injustice and calls for summary action. The two main levels of his poetry—the sensual and the intellectual—remain separate, and there is little reciprocal enrichment. Perhaps what one misses most is … the distinctive power over words, the individual word, and the arrangement of words in broad units. When this power is lacking a poem may yet move, it is true, but it is scarcely poetically moving, for what it has to deliver is not enhanced...