What struck me … as I read through [Dudek's Collected Poetry] was the way in which certain approaches to subject matter, certain ways of articulating what can only be called arguments, form a part of his poetic content right from the start. Although he doesn't find the proper form for his "statement" right away, he is always striving for an intellectually tough poetry. Even in the early poems, where his control of "voice" is weak, the philosophic tone that marks all his serious poetry is present.

One of Dudek's continuing interests has been the process of thought. His poems often provide paradigms of that process, or icons of the results of that process. They move from a formal, traditional metric towards a prose-like, argumentative, "open" metric, which often resolves (in the longer poems, and especially Atlantis), into a near-prose of short maxims which remind me of La Rochefoucauld. (pp...