The Key to the City

New York City is the locus for the sequence of poems entitled The Ruins. Winters's city is starkly and powerfully drawn; here we meet a West Indian cleaning lady at the night laundromat, a 12-year-old Spanish girl thrown off a roof by older boys, two derelicts, a piece-stitcher, a billboard man, a murdered prostitute, a child suicideall those whom the city tries to crush and destroy. There is nevertheless a Whitmanesque glory to Winters's urban turbulence, a vitality that occasionally triumphs and thrives on adversity. New York City, she suggests, is dangerous and difficult, but also heated and passionate, a town where even the poor and disenfranchised enjoy a certain richness of experience. December