The Arcades

by Michael Davidson

In The Arcades, Davidson juxtaposes the imaginary ideal against the "junk" of contemporary culture, the Romantic dream of the exotic with a contemporary world filled with cheap materiality. The Arcades is a beautiful and lyrical volume of poetry, just as it is gritty and honest about our declining civilization.

Paperback

First published August 1, 1998

About the author

Born in Oakland, California on December 18, 1944, Michael Davidson attended San Francisco State University and continued his graduate degrees at The State University of New York at Buffalo. He is currently Distinguished Professor of English at the University of California, San Diego in La Jolla.

In addition to being a widely published poet and poetry editor (he is represented in the 2004 edition of Best American Poetry by a poem entitled "Bad Modernism"), Davidson is known for insightful literary criticism, his work in disability studies, and for the meticulous editing of the monumental George Oppen, New Collected Poems.