Mr. Dudek is introverted and emotional: what takes fresh and novel shape in his poetry is a sensuous reaction. In The Transparent Sea …, a retrospective collection, the best pieces are songs conveying an immediate mood, such as the one beginning "A bird who sits over my door"; or studies in the movement and sound of words, like "Tree in a Snowstorm"; or ideas that suddenly twist round into paradoxes, like the admirable opening poem on the pineal gland, or his comparison of the universe to a watch which makes religion a search "for larger regions of clockwise justice"; or quick vivid sketches like "Late Winter" or "Lines for a Bamboo Stick," the latter with an Oriental reference; or a study of swift movement, like his picture of a little girl skipping called "The Child."

One of his favourite adjectives is "wet," and some of his best poems have the quality of the wet water-colour that is done quickly and makes its point all at once. Sometimes an image strikes him in a grotesque form, as in the astonishingly successful "Mouths"; sometimes as a muttering and brooding anxiety, as in the near-prose fantasy "The Dead." One often feels that a poem is inconclusive, but then one often feels too that the inconclusiveness is part of the effect, as it is in a sketch (pp. 305-06)

In short, I feel that when the poet says

      The world I see (this poem)
      I make out of the fragments of my pain
      and out of the pleasures of my trembling senses

he is telling us the exact truth about his poetic process.

It follows that he is working against his best qualities when he writes in a sequence, whether of description or thought. Here he is dependent on habit, and produces the clichés of habit. In the "Provincetown" sequence there is the same kind of maunderlust that filled so much of Europe. Sexual imagery is also a trap for him, for sex is something he feels self-conscious and explanatory about. At other times he is not satisfied with inconclusiveness, and some of the poems sag into platitude in an effort to round off, as in "On Sudden Death" and elsewhere. Yet … there is much to be grateful for in Mr. Dudek's book, and a great variety of pleasant and melodious writing. (p. 306)