City of Eternal Spring

With his brave new book, Weaver completes the trilogy that began with The Plum Flower Dance: Poems 1985 to 2005, and was followed by The Government of Nature. Here, Weaver's speaker finds himself in Taiwan and China, trying to escape the memory of an uncle's sexual abuse while navigating what it means to be a black American in a foreign land: "black on black in black in silhouette." Weaver's allusions can feel sentimental due to a lack of specificity and a reliance on abstract images, such as "ghosts" and "souls," but at their best his poems build on winding philosophical lines that act as narrative threads and vehicles for self-exploration. At the heart of the book is a series of poems, entitled "Archaeology of Time," that forms a collective flashback into the speaker's life "in Baltimore where the mills send a gray/ applause to the sky." Crucially, Weaver consistently demonstrates the ability to jump seamlessly between thoughts and places, to create poems that move. Despite the challenges of writing through trauma, Weaver and his speaker show resolve that is empowering for the reader to behold, as "when the prison/ frees me to know I am not it and it is not me." (Oct.)