Jacqueline de Weever - Waste Basket Elegies

JACQUELINE de WEEVER.

WASTE BASKET ELEGIES & PLYWOOD DELIGHTS

Writers have responded in many ways to seeing the cities in which they

dwell become places of crisis and mass mourning. In this somber and elegant

collection, Jacqueline de Weever roams Brooklyn and Manhattan

to glean darkness and light as a city confronts the COVID pandemic. De

Weever, as an elder poet and thus among the most vulnerable New Yorkers,

studied the city as architecture and infrastructure in crisis, as public

art blossoming out of stress and darkness, and as a mask over the never-ending

struggle for justice against violence. Amid a masked and

boarded-up New York, the poet found unexpected bursts of hope in the

streets, and has revealed them here in terse and understated poems, like

watercolors of a near-Apocalypse, or a butterfly at the edge of a volcanic

crater.

In a prefatory page, the poet writes: “Anguish floated on the breezes

blowing through New York City as we tried desperately to keep ourselves

alive. Some of us awoke to the sight of refrigerated trucks waiting

outside hospitals to receive the dead. In upper Manhattan, some awoke

to ‘Flower Flash,’ installations donated by Lewis Miller Designs. Black

trash baskets, old telephone booths, subway entrances appeared stuffed

or garlanded with flowers. The florist’s night work became altars of

mourning and remembrance.”

This is the 307th publication of The Poet’s Press. ISBN 9798374129694.

Published February 2023. 78 pages, 6 x 9 inches, paperback,