The Pitch

Inspired by that infamous city-dwelling poet Baudelaire, the 48 poems of Thompson's second collection swagger, looking with equal parts wonder and spleen through the streets of New York, where "sway governs" and "There's always something else to see." Jerky, percussive sentences strung in sometimes shapely and sometimes jagged stanzas and blocks of prose convey the sights, sounds and smells of the city in which "the blind, milky liquor of Yankee fog" aids "absence masquerading as engulfment." The city also inspires strung-out escapism. Police become "dolls built to simulate laughter," and, in a fit of abstraction, a crowd is "an armada of embarkations and retreats." Sudden swerves between densely packed images ("Today's purple hedges part their hairs") and shifts in tone from humorous to despairing to empathic give the poems a destabilizing feel, at times obscuring their subjects but more often creating momentum. In the best of these, Thompson (Live Feed, 2001) makes the awful beautiful and the beautiful awful, in the hope that "when/ radiance comes we go/ with it even if it blinds us." (June)