'Every poem like a new geometry -€“ of surprises. A strange voice of cat's cradles in a Kafkaesque half-light -€“ very strange and unpredictable.'
Ted Hughes
'For Rudolf, writing and painting especially, but also music, are exploratory tools that enable him to probe more deeply into his own self, his relationships, as well as all those other selves that are not ''himself.'' For he is obviously also par excellence a poet and an intellectual attracted to otherness, to what he is not.'
Antioch Review
'It moves us through time and space to the long view of a life's work...European Hours is an open book of secrets, and the remarkable intimacy Rudolf has spun through it that binds the reader to the poems.'
Paul Pines, American Book Review
'His poems are charged with the love of beauty: in paint, in the poetry he admires, and in women. His longing is almost impersonal in its intensity.'
Elaine Feinstein, JQ
European Hours represents a life’s work severely curated. The poems, prose texts, and prose poems which make the cut, from 1964 to 2016, are diverse in form, and run parallel to his highly praised volumes of memoirs.
George Mackay Brown, reviewing Rudolf in the Scotsman, noted his ‘fine exact craftsmanship: no word or syllable wasted, so that each image is stark and true’. Robin Skelton in the Malahat Review spoke of his work as ‘witty, precise, beautifully cadenced, and courageously exploratory’. Reflecting on his own influences, Rudolf mentions James Wright, Robert Creeley and Ian Hamilton early on; and later, Central and East European poets including Paul Celan, Miroslav Holub and Vasko Popa, as well as the American Objectivists.