This Thursday: Anne Winters: Metal and Money on her Mind

Poet ANNE WINTERS will be in the county this Thursday.

Here's an excerpt from Emily Nussbaum's NYT review of Winter's most recent book:

'The Displaced of Capital': Unassisted Living

ANNE WINTERS is a nature poet. But where other poets might gaze into the woods, Winters has metal and money on her mind. Her last book -- the acclaimed debut ''The Key to the City'' -- was published in 1986, but the wait turns out to have been worth it, for her second effort is a revelation, a daring exploration of New York that is at once high-flown, enraged, philosophical and subtle, Marxist and Wordsworthian, deeply domestic and focused with a spectacular riskiness on the economic engines of inequity.

Why risky? Take the title, ''The Displaced of Capital'': it reads like the warning sign of a dissertation. And yet nothing about Winters's writing feels like homework. Using themes others have mined for agitprop, she builds elegies to urban poverty that balance between lyricism and manifesto. In ''Cold-Water Flats,'' neglected tenants survive a brutal winter even as ''the zinc-lidded bathtubs in their kitchens swarm / with gravid, amber-bellied roaches.'' With a housing inspector's precision, she ticks off a series of grinding frustrations, ending with the flow of water from heatless taps: ''at faucet-mouth, numbed lips, unceasing arrival, the water / which later, I think, will seem to have been / most precious -- being useful, humble, chaste.''

It's a conclusion that in less controlled hands could seem like mere romanticism. But Winters's grander language is endlessly working toward a larger purpose: to dramatize Manhattan's darker contrasts. Helicopters drop ''like handkerchiefs from the evening'' while homeless families huddle on cots. An opera house performance of ''Tosca'' echoes underground to a hidden workman. Lucky lives bump against ''the thousand / stratagems of those who simply must not spend.'' Everywhere, money is the slippery foliage underfoot. In one poem, anxious bank customers watch the ''moist bills and coins / counted out on linoleum sills''; in another, a drug dealer's payments travel to a foreign country ''metamorphosed, moving / in electrons on a copper strip.'' Even a friend's overdose evokes a predawn bus trip to her apartment and ''the first coins dropping in the driver's metal bowl.''

Winters's concern with power is not simply abstract. In ''An Immigrant Woman,'' the narrator's tentative friendship with a Guatemalan maid is shattered when the woman's daughter dies in a building collapse. The tragedy is a failure of city management, but it also exposes the tentative materials of these women's friendship: love, but also guilt and resentment, the relationship of the immigrant and the native. In ''One-Forty-Sixth Street: My Stepmother's Chloral'' (part of a series called ''A Sonnet Map of Manhattan''), the narrator's gleeful response to escaping from her abusive stepmother ends abruptly with her recognition of that emotion's unsettling echo: ''I lived my factitious joy as you lived your factitious hate.''

In the concluding poem, ''The First Verse,'' Winters initially seems to revel at last in sheer language: she is examining, word by word, the first line of the Torah. As she reads the commentaries, she lingers over Rashi's insight that ''the world is made for Torah.'' But even in her own ecstasy, Winters promptly tucks in a telling parenthetical (''The lovely sentence -- the terrible world''), a reminder that might act as a motto for her own writing. In Winters's idiosyncratic vision, poetic language is capable of more than ornamentation. Beauty can jolt, and words -- however gleaming -- can act not as a glaze but as a stripper, eating through easy beliefs to the truth beneath.

7 pm in the Humanities Instructional Building, Room 135 - and, yes, the reading is FREE. Parking generally runs about $7.00.