“The title of Ron Charach's Dungenessque is extremely revealing, becoming a metaphor that unifies the entire collection. In the title poem, the speaker invites us to 'Crack [him] open like a crab/amused at the strange soft fur along my shell.' He says that 'you and your analyst/will pick through the bowl of white flesh.' Charach is himself a psychiatrist, and his poems present a field day for amateur psychoanalysts. The poems in Dungenessque are deeply humane, as Charach employs animal imagery to express, with wit and compassion, the relationship between what might be called civilized behaviours and our animal instincts.

The opening poems, 'Advisement,' a twist on Prufrock, and 'Prize Poem with Animals,' set a humorous tone of self-mockery that comes only with strong self-awareness. That tone permeates the collection, but curiosity rather than scorn or ridicule apparently governs Charach's approach: 'The subject of my work remains/the human animal, ill-prized./and the four-seasoned human face.' While Charach exposes the hidden man, his fears, repressed sexuality and foibles, what the speaker of 'The Three-Piece Man in a Serious Suit' calls 'the fool within,' the speakers maintain their dignity by understanding that they are struggling with their physicality and base instincts as well as with their rather fragile and perhaps psychologically damaging sense of proper behaviour. Charach makes these struggles themselves distinctly human, and in doing so he distinguishes his speakers from the animals to whom he repeatedly relates them.

That is not to say Charach is unwilling to celebrate the physical being or to mock pretension. 'Morning Poem with Animals' rejoices, in fine bawdy and ribald style, in the power and the glory of the penis: 'my arrow, the untrainable pointer,/a man's best, last-remaining/friend.' For Charach, refinement and polish, 'the smooth sheen of the efficient/[are] easily destroyed,' and, in 'Ruining Teflon,' even a simple task such as doing the dishes offers the opportunity to reveal that domestic arrangements can be frail. Perhaps the best example of Charach's view of the contradictions, dilemmas, and even hypocrises of a man living in a consumer society and wanting to remain free from material values is in 'Courtesy of Plastic,' in which the courtesy that the speaker shows to a homeless man is indeed plastic. In a moment of weakness and enlightenment, the speaker invites into his home 'the derelict who frequents yards that back onto the ravine.' The speaker compares him to an animal 'raccooning' in the yards, but he wants the homeless man to teach him about greed, to get him 'off the treadmill' of consumerism and back to his 'childhood ethic/that all inherited wealth is evil,' even while proudly showing off all of his possessions. However, when the man 'starts screwing around with the remote control' and getting 'into the Chivas,' the speaker has had enough. Reassuring the man that 'We're all bums,' the speaker threatens to 'call 9-1-1' if his guest doesn't leave. In 'Courtesy of Plastic,' Charach masterfully incorporates many of the metaphors and themes present in his highly literate yet accessible and engaging collection.”

— Event, The Douglas College Review

“Charach's voice is pliant and sonorous; sinuosity of thought flowers into deep and true feeling. this is an impressive and engaging collection.”

— The Canadian Jewish News

“Ron Charach's poems have, I think, no parallel in their willingness to display the conjoined workings of an effortlessly literate and ironic mind.”

— Don Coles