December 1, 2014
With his brave new book, Weaver completes the trilogy that began with The Plum Flower Dance: Poems 1985 to 2005, and was followed by The Government of Nature. Here, Weaver's speaker finds himself in Taiwan and China, trying to escape the memory of an uncle's sexual abuse while navigating what it means to be a black American in a foreign land: "black on black in black in silhouette." Weaver's allusions can feel sentimental due to a lack of specificity and a reliance on abstract images, such as "ghosts" and "souls," but at their best his poems build on winding philosophical lines that act as narrative threads and vehicles for self-exploration. At the heart of the book is a series of poems, entitled "Archaeology of Time," that forms a collective flashback into the speaker's life "in Baltimore where the mills send a gray/ applause to the sky." Crucially, Weaver consistently demonstrates the ability to jump seamlessly between thoughts and places, to create poems that move. Despite the challenges of writing through trauma, Weaver and his speaker show resolve that is empowering for the reader to behold, as "when the prison/ frees me to know I am not it and it is not me."
November 1, 2014
Patterson Award winner Weaver here completes his "Plum Flower Trilogy," begun with The Plum Flower Dance: Poems 1983 to 2005 and The Government of Nature. The new work opens with a Chinese poem written by Weaver, an African American who found a spiritual home in China after visiting via the Fulbright Program. But its Daoist philosophy of acceptance is soon unsettled by self-awareness: "The tea comes/ with a young woman who stares at me, the black/ she has heard of, the black she cannot see...." In the total otherness of place that mark China and Taiwan, the writer is able to release the past that binds him, including sexual victimhood, the loss of a child, and emotional collapse: "what I cannot be is/ suddenly what I was made/ to believe can never be." Sometimes the words tumble out: one sentence can comprise an entire stanza or even a whole poem. A more measured piece, "The Workers in Beijing," deftly meshes Chinese construction workers on a lunch break with the poet's remembered life as a factory worker in Baltimore ."..I reach for my brown bag, / fried chicken sandwich, sweet potato pie." VERDICT There is much pain here, as well as concern for the future, but mostly these poems celebrate love in the face of precariousness. The result: mystical, generous poems about difference in the context of universal truth.--Ellen Kaufman, New York
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