The Displaced of Capital (Phoenix Poets)
Compassionate, careful, and detailed almost to a fault, this admirable second volume from Winters (her first in 18 years) follows the workers, the students, and the architectures of New York City, from Lower Broadway's "army of signs disowning the workplace and longing for night" to "Slip-pilings on the Brooklyn littoral." Much of the collection comprises two long works: the first, "An Immigrant Woman," follows the poet's friendship with Pilar, a pious, hardworking Guatemalan mother who becomes a Manhattan hotel worker and suffers a shocking loss. In "A Sonnet Map of Manhattan" Winters (The Key to the City) delivers what the title promises, as each page sketches a block or neighborhood: on 168th Street, "seas/ of snowy cots sleep tenement families" in a crowded shelter. As in many a 19th-century novel, Winters' accumulation of realistic sights and sounds both helps us feel for her struggling characters, and indicts the economic system under which they live. (A final, more abstract long poem, "The First Verse," explicates the start of the Hebrew Bible.) Winters' blend of ethical with formal concerns should recommend her to fans of Marilyn Hacker or of Robert Pinsky (who blurbs the book); her documentary methods, and her knowledge of New York City's hidden spaces, might give her rigorous poetry further appeal.Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.