The Displaced of Capital

by Anne Winters

Winner of the 2005 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize.
 
The long-awaited follow-up to The Key to the City —a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1986—Anne Winters's The Displaced of Capital emanates a quiet and authoritative passion for social justice, embodying the voice of a subtle, sophisticated conscience.

The "displaced" in the book's title refers to the poor, the homeless, and the disenfranchised who populate New York, the city that serves at once as gritty backdrop, city of dreams, and urban nightmare. Winters also addresses the culturally, ethnically, and emotionally excluded and, in these politically sensitive poems, writes without sentimentality of a cityscape of tenements and immigrants, offering her poetry as a testament to the lives of have-nots. In the central poem, Winters witnesses the relationship between two women of disparate social classes whose friendship represents the poet's political convictions. With poems both powerful and musical, The Displaced of Capital marks Anne Winters's triumphant return and assures her standing as an essential New York poet.

Genres: Poetry

72 pages, Paperback

First published October 15, 2004

Reviews

[Marie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this. The sonnet series about New York evokes so much character and color, and the ending series on the first words of the Bible, which I thought I wouldn't like for breaking the mold of the rest of the piece, instead trapped me in it and I gobbled it up.

I've been thinking a lot lately about folklore and diaspora ... lost myths ... I forget that even the biggest religions have gaps in their histories, and there's a real allure to those unknowables. Why is god plural in a monotheism? What was that word that doesn't translate anymore?

Anyway, yes, this book felt like taking a little time travel trip to New York in the 90s. Much recommended.

[Vapula · Rating 2 out of 5]

While the the description of this piece caught my interest, I must admit to being disappointed with the majority of the works. Most of the poems have a structure devoid of rhythm, leaving them reliant on the words apart from structure, but it is on this front that they fail to provide much. There were exceptions however, primarily with two poems. I enjoyed the repetitive nature and structure of Villanelle, as well as the metaphor and allusion in East Fifth Street: a Poster for the Oresteia.

[Karen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted to love this book. I really did, especially when I went through and read the reviews of her work. But, it took me a lot of time (too much time, actually) to wade through the poems at the start of the collection. Long and detailed, I often had a hard time understanding what the main point of each poem actually was.

With that said, I found the sequence at the end of Winters book stunning -- In "A Sonnet Map of Manhattan" the poet divides her thoughts into different poems and different streets. In this way, she draws a picture of one of the "displaced" by profiling him or her in a natural setting. For example, she looks at a drive-in teller in "First Avenue: Drive-in Teller" --- through tight description and action, I believe Winters really shines in this part of the book.

Should I give this book three or four stars? Not sure. For now, I will leave my rating the way it is....

[Kelly · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had to put these poems down while I was going through a harsh time. Now i have picked them up again. The tears just flowed out of me. Like the book pored rain. Hard core new york. I have stepped around wanting to feel the real and current Jacob Riisian world of NYC. I don't know with it if you can look it in the face, to its face ever and survive that. Like Medusa, it seems to need a refraction to protect yourself and still confront the beast. I have just the courage right now to poke my head in the cave, and not open any cupboards or peak in any drawers:)

it was written by my friends' mother, who has a lot of first hand experience with pain, and still manages to believe in creation, still manages to create. Makes me think sometimes of Roman Pollanski, of all he has been through and still he, out of shear will creates. the pull of an artist is something great,

[Rachel · Rating 3 out of 5]

My focus while reading was the concept of "the displaced of capital" literal meanings: those without a place (illegal immigrants, displaced from home and from the U.S.), those displaced from capital/money (poverty), those who are not allowed a fair place in America (immigration issues especially again). Ultimately how the city plays into the lives of these people, how "the displaced from capital come to the capital" (11). The city as the place representing the larger nation and mindset, the city as a place of both supposed hope and hopelessness. Ten years after publishing, this book is still completely relevant. It directs attention to important, heart-breaking and -strengthening issues of modern American/New York city life, all with remarkable sonic beauty.

[Ruth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Poems about life mostly in the "less desirable" parts of New York City. These are narrative poems, the stories they tell are haunting. Especially "An Immigrant Woman"--it really gripped me.

The speaker of these poems delights in the diversity of her great city, but there is unease at the core of her pleasure:

. . . how can I today
warm myself at the sad heartening narrative of immigration?
Unnoticed, the narrative has altered,
the displaced of capital have come to the capital.

As you can see, Winters is sometimes talky rather than lyrical, a trap I myself have been known to fall into. But I am really glad to find another poet tackling these issues.

[David · Rating 2 out of 5]

Unless maybe you know NYC first hand enough to care, reading this book is like trying to feign interest in neighborhood gossip. Sure, it delves and is eruditely composed, but the intensely selfy level on which everything happens, the minutiae of coat buttons, undershirts and times subways arrived just aren't inviting, no matter how carefully mixed in it all is with great cries that echo back to the classics. I wish the material of this anthology had been used to create hard hitting short stories, not these finicky textbooky poems.

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

I put Winters' book on a short shelf with a book like Marshall Berman's All That's Solid Melts into Air, the short shelf of books about the Seventies effort to recover the humanist Marx. Confessionalism by way of an historical, one dares say an anamnestic, account of civil rights idealism, and the shifting ground of Whitman's "well-joined scheme," subject of the book's first poem, the superb "The Mill-Race." Berman's poetic subject is Baudelaire the flaneur, and Winters' second book offers the pleasure of a well-joined pilgrimage.

[Kent · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first poem is amazing! And I think it allows the extra narrative, overtly political poem which comes next its intelligence.

[Joe · Rating 5 out of 5]

file w/ sonnet series about new york, see frank o'hara. poems about being a graduate student and living in low income neighborhoods, consciously working through real work vs intellectual activity.