SOURCE: "Local Heroes," in New Statesman & Society, Vol. 7, September 9, 1994, p. 37.

Below, Rumens disputes the publishers' claim that History: The Home Movie is a verse-novel.

In "Epic", Patrick Kavanagh is consoled by Homer's ghost. So what if the Monaghan poet spent the "year of the Munich bother" arguing about "who owned / That half a rood of rock?" The Iliad itself was made from "such / A local row". History: the Home Movie doesn't seek the epic in the ordinary quite in this way. The technique is to show us both History and the Home Movie, the "Munich bother" as it infiltrates the "local row", the local-row element in the Munich bother.

These poems document the entwined history of two families during the current century, the English Raines and the Russian Pasternaks. There are 87 poems, compactly built in the slightly noun-bound, three-line, two-or-three-beat-a-line stanza form that is one of Raine's old...