Description
Book SynopsisFrom Richard Howard''s Foreword: The burden . . . of this poet''s responsibility . . . rests on his eloquence, his way of making us see. For him, . . . the significance of an event or a place is not to be found within it, as within a nutshell, but without, enveloping the language which has generated it, as a light generates a vapor.
Writing both narrative and lyric, love poem and elegy, the poems in Marc Woodworth''s debut collection, ARCADE, are alternately severe and feverish, contemplative and intimate, novelistic and hauntingly stark. ARCADE opens with a sequence entitled The City set in an unnamed and compellingly imagined continental metropolis between the world wars. Early poems in the sequence were featured in The Paris Review''s new writers issue and take their place here in what Frank Bidart calls a fantasia on and hymn to the city, one that evokes the private desires and public scale of urban life where walkers disappear in a spell of edges and two hearts [beat] in e
