The poet's way of thinking and the city's ways too are reflected in a live phrase like "sunken centenary main"--the two plain Old English words as if sent by the Department of Public Works to flank the contrasting, Latinate "centenary" as if it were a legal document, with the sounds of consonant and vowel conveying the girth and solidity of that thick, long-ago earth-swallowed water pipe. The water main, the radio probe, the worklamp--these manifest human arts too, and like the art of Tosca they are mortal causes for wonder.

Wonder may be the central emotion of this book, rather than the political feelings evoked by the title, which sounds so much like a quotation from Marx. (I am told it is not.) Political feelings the book has, abundantly, but as with Winters's earlier book The Key to the City, its spirit is closer to the tenement photographs of Jacob Riis than to the writing of Marx.

The final poem in the volume exemplifies that feeling of wonder, with an unpredictable source, demonstrating Winters's range of material and feeling. The poem, titled "The First Verse," meditates and associates and extrapolates from the first Hebrew words of Genesis. Here Winters's image for infinite complexity and mystery is not the subterranean but a surface of proliferating channels and branches. And wonder is not confined to solemn awe but can include comedy, the scholar's comedy of knowledge, the unsolvable knot that ties meanings to other meanings:

...The Bible in Hebrew--irreducible!
Yet at the first verse, a hair-thin net of cracks
appears, each crack a vast highway, and wildly we leap
onto this first, this universal, cobble, BRESHIT. "In-the-beginning."
Or maybe, "In-the-beginning-of." Of what, you may ask--of "making"? Maybe--
and so the slight break ramifies and blooms
into shelf-feet of commentaries, monographs, and now
you must swiftly ransack your Sumerian--
yes, without Enuma Elish there's no understanding the matter--

Within a few lines, she is saying in exasperated but amused wonderment, "But I forgot to mention/the Crimean War"-- quite validly, since during that conflict:

...It seems the war upset the local
Karaites, who saddled up and fled
to St. Petersburg, taking their cherished, oldest dated
scrolls of the Bible, wrapped for freshness, in date leaves, and left them
in the public library. But naturally, the public library!
And so these sectarians, not even actually, exactly,
Jewish--the rabbis' deep-dyed foes--preserved the inerrant Word,
though not without hosts of tiny scribal errors
some day to set shuddering
whole forests of editors, compositors, microfilmers--

There is an ebullient, entranced verve to this picture of the unknowable. Indeterminance has spurred Winters to learn ancient Hebrew, and to follow those hairline flaws as though they were a vital road map. In this regard, her work is the opposite of an opaque demonstration that language is inadequate. On the contrary, she learns languages to study the shapes and varieties of their inadequacies. Like the city, like the Bible, language in her poems is an alluring maze where the mind is propelled with the physicality of music, in consonant and vowel.

Vivid and reflective, documentary and visionary, re-imagining the city of New York with the same urgency that ponders the Hebrew of Genesis, this is a passionate, artful and re-readable book. It is also a strikingly contemporary book. For all its reaching back--into prehistoric geology, into Sumerian, or on a personal level into the time of actual cold-water flats in Greenwich Village--the book is also fascinated by the drive-in teller, the pre-teen drug scout, the construction tremors that weaken buildings on the Brooklyn littoral. Her sympathy with immigrants of small means who are displaced by the projects of Capital is humane but not sentimental; it is driven partly by the scholarly need to know the originating roots of everything--philological or economic. That avid curiosity inspires her inventions and keeps the pace of her work lively. With its extraordinary speed, scope and audacity, Anne Winters's poetry both expresses our time and resists it.

This issue features three poems by Anne Winters, "MacDougal Street: Old-Law Tenements," "The Displaced of Capital" and "East Fifth Street: A Poster for the Oresteia."

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