Arcade

Marc Woodworth's long-awaited first collection of poetry, Arcade, is a spectacular new addition to the Grove Press Poetry Series. Writing narrative and lyric, love poem and elegy, Woodworth engages us with poems alternately severe and feverish, contemplative and intimate, novelistic and hauntingly stark. In a sequence entitled "The City, " Woodworth imagines a poet who lives in a lost city where the beautiful vies with the brutal. He sees a girl's thigh as "a pearl in the black hand/of her mug-faced criminal" and pauses as "a violent light strays over the sheets as if it might kindle/the world to ashes." In another poem Woodworth effortlessly enters the grieving mind of Sophia Tolstoy as she mourns at her husband's grave, and "Letter from Paris" provides a haunting portrait of a broken relationship, shattered by the "stubborn vicissitudes that moved us in some slippery, casual way toward disowning one another." Woodworth's creation of a rare and intimate world and his ability to encompass the "yawning pit of generation" make Arcade a collection both intoxicating and intellectually rewarding.