Grove Press
Grove Press
Grove Press
“The burden . . . of this poet’s responsibility . . . rests on his eloquence, his way of making us see. For him, as Conrad observes somewhere, 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.” –Richard Howard (from the Foreword)
“There is a rawness and immediacy of emotion. . . . [Woodworth’s] poems suck in the breath of Sophia Tolstoy, Lovis Corinth, and Margarethe von Trotta and immerse the reader in characters so abandoned to their respective arts and loves that one might almost believe in the archival witness of the work. . . . The collection is at once imaginative and meticulous.” –Abigail A. Cloud, Pleiades
‘marc Woodworth’s Arcade is a passage through epistolary, ekphrastic, and pastoral poetry, through the revenants of Frans Masereel, Lovis Corinth, and Margarethe von Trotta wander as guides to the vicissitudes of aesthetic passion–the ecstasies of work, the fatality of making. Here is Masereel’s Berlin in chiaroscuro: sorrowful, inconsolable, and here, Corinth, painting the lake of Walchensee–his “lake of suicides’–on canvas after canvas until his death. Woodworth’s lyric grace and formal assurance are exemplary, but it is in the richness of his diction, recuperative and precise, that the poems achieve their particular luminosity.
And no reader should miss Woodworth’s chronicle of an imaginary filmmaker in “Herr Soma Relates the Circumstances of His Breakdown Before Making The Knife in the Tarn,” an inventive splicing of prose-lyric testifying to the salvific power of art.” –Carolyn Forch”
“From the opening sequence (both fantasia and hymn to the city), to the final poem with its eerie identical arches through which we can glimpse “the world beneath the waking world,” Marc Woodworth’s first book shows us a demonic and abandoned world, inhabited by the ghost of an elemental architecture. Begin with the opening sequence, or “Herr Soma Relates . . .” A wonderful debut.” –Frank Bidart
“The burden . . . of this poet’s responsibility . . . rests on his eloquence, his way of making us see. For him, as Conrad observes somewhere, 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.” –Richard Howard (from the Foreword)
“A large and venturesome talent . . . what impresses in the total reading is a very palpable identity–an exploratory gusto taking risks . . . constituting a startling ensemble which presses upon the reader like the opening of a door, and shows a perspective of imminent excitements beckoning beyond.” –Ben Belitt
An Independent Literary Publisher Since 1917
