City of Eternal Spring

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."